After Fedora 9 being mostly a disaster, the upgrade Fedora 10 was comparatively smooth sailing.

My work box has a dual-head display NON XINERAMA and getting this working has been an exercise in progressive breakage. It worked fine ages ago, but as more folks get dual-displays that are driven different ways (Xinerama, dual-output-cards, etc) then the old perfectly working ways get broken.

Win:
preupgrade solves a lot manual problems with yum.
TightVNC now works again without screwing with the font path manually!
TightVNC now works on my :0.1 display without being ridiculously slow!
Everything seems a bit faster.
I can use Firefox with Flash 10.

Lose:
Virtual terminals still don't work, they're blank.
KDE 4 still sucks, still is slow, and still doesn't understand dual-head. It puts a task bar in the middle of the screen. Thank you. I'm still stuck with GNOME.
GNOME has trouble starting up nautiulus, and needs to be manually started. Something about bonobo-activation-server. Jeez, GNOME has enough problems leaving these retarded daemons all over the place when you're done using GNOME, and now it can't start it?
Fonts on the second display get garbled, with Flash + Firefox.

That's pretty good. A bunch of wins, and only one new bug.

For now.

So I was in GameStop this afternoon, and a couple of teens were trying out Guitar Hero World Tour. I was watching, and noticed some cool things. Notably, you can sustain under a other notes, which makes rolled chords look nicer -- something I've wanted for a while. GH3 fakes it, as you can do the hand motion but you don't have to leave the lower frets depressed. I pointed this out to my wife and we were chatting about it, as we both play. The kids hears us talking.

One kid: "You play?"

Me: "A bit. Since September".

The other one: "Are you any good?"

Me: "Well, define good." (It's all relative. I think I suck, because I don't FC tunes or play competitively.)

Other kid: (giggling, he's got this old fart beat!) "You play on... Expert?"

Me: "I 5* Cult Of Personality on Expert. Beat Lou." [One of the hardest tunes in the game to beat, and a high score.]

That wiped the smile off his face. "Yeah, you're good".

If they only had two guitars, I would have totally sandbagged him.

I'm a newbie Guitar Hero player. My sister's boyfriend brought it over when visiting a while back. We fooled around with it for a little bit. It was fun, and I could do most of the stuff on Medium. So I decided to get it, you know, "for the kids". I picked up Guitar Hero Aerosmith as my first one, and I've had it for a month or two.

Which is harder, GH3 or GH3 Aerosmith? Everything I've heard says that GH3 is insanely hard, and it's dialed back on the Aerosmith.

I don't follow this. With Aerosmith, having pretty much no experience, I cleared out medium and hard in a day or two, and started in on Expert.

That kicked my ass. Wow, this is what the game REALLY is like.

Specifically, "Movin' On" and the eternal guitar solo at the end of "Back in the Saddle". I don't think I've played "Back in the Saddle" since barely getting through it on three stars. It took a few weeks, as I'd get stuck on these harder tunes for a long time.

I finish Expert, again barely, with three stars. With a lot of effort I can get four stars on a couple tunes, but it's not worth it. So the first set has four stars and I have little interest in trying to get more.

Now, I pick up GH3 and start playing. I hear it's a lot harder, so, I start on Hard. I 5-star the first song, clearly too easy, so I up it to expert. 5-star the first song again. What's going on?

I keep going. Most of the tunes I can 4-star, with the occasional 5 and 3. No fails at all. That's the first four sets, all sightreading.

The timing seems easier than Aerosmith. I can be really sloppy with the hammer-ons and it will still work, where the same timing would fail under Aerosmith.

Does it get harder??

EDIT: Holy crap, yes, it does. "Raining Blood" is one tune that I can't beat after trying it few times. After that beating Lou was a piece of cake.

I upgraded to Fedora 9, and each time I do this it gets a little more broken.

First, KDE 4.0 is really broken with dual-head displays. It used to be mildly broken (focus problems) but now it's unusable (both desktops on one screen). Come on, guys. Is having two displays really that uncommon? It's 2008! Oh, and it's also much slower than KDE 3.5. For the first time in years, I've had to switch to GNOME. The horror.

GNOME also continues their trend of making things that used to work not work anymore. There seems to be a concerted effort to kill remote X displays, even on a trusted network, thanks to this annoying nanny known as GDM. At one point, you used to be able to set "NeverPlaceCookiesOnNFS=True", and that stopped working around Fedora 7 or 8, but I could work around it. I even did it the right way. Not by doing xhost +, but by having my login script put the right authorization cookies in my per-user file.

But, now, the icing the cake: "DisallowTCP=True" is now mandatory. That's great, they implement all sorts of other pointless options, but the whole reason X exists, network transparency, is killed. No way to work around it. No remote X for you!

Jeez guys, I log to remotely to about 35 machines in our datacenter and I don't want to set up 35 SSH sessions, dammit. We're firewalled. We're a small company. X's security is just fine.

Yeah, my fault for not booting the live CD.

There are some local issues that bring out the NIMBYs, but an equal contingent of unreasonable people of the opposite view. But they have no snappy, insulting name, that can turn a reasonable discussion of compromise into a polarized, mudslinging flame war!

You know, the people who think it's cool to ride an ATV full-throttle at midnight, but are NIMBYs themselves when it comes to own their property. People who have no sense of respect or neighborliness. People who shit where they don't eat. I've heard them called trespassers, encroachers, etc., but that's not cool enough.

So, I hereby define FURBY: I Fool-around in UR BackYard.

...for all values of "F".

Update: I have one even better... iFURBY. I love the implicit connotation of this one.

Ever paint a room, finish, and... decide that the color sucks? This happened all the time to me, and for years I couldn't figure it out. Maybe you picked a color, liked it, and took it home. Maybe you even did your homework, took home a few cards, and picked from one of those.

The answer: never, ever pick a paint color in the store.

Here's what you do.

1. Buy a book of color sample cards. Not one card, ALL of them. For $15, you get all the colors you could ever want. Take it home and walk around. $15 is nothing compared to spending $50 in paint that you absolutely hate, and the wheel will last longer than you do.

2. Pick your hue, by considering the deepest color on the card, usually at the bottom. Most of the cards are different lightnesses of a single color, with the basis color at the bottom. If you want a light gray with brown undertones, look at the bottom - it should be a deep brown. Sometimes the base tone is surprising. You might find the base tone is orange when the lighter tone looks brown.

2. Pick your shade by choosing one of the levels on the card. After you pick it, go one level lighter. There is a bit of an optical illusion you need to compensate for, when you take that chip and put it on a big wall, it will feel one level darker, even though it's technically the same shade.

3a. (for married people): Spread out the next few colors card to the left and right of your chosen hue, off the wheel. Let your wife pick the particular color. This will save lots of problems later. Note that I did not say you actually need to buy that shade, just let her pick.

4. Test your color by looking at the chip in daylight, and at night with the lights on. Natural daylight is much bluer than typical incandescent light bulbs, which are more yellow. You might find that the added blue at day, or the added yellow at night, is not to your taste. I distinctly remember picking a tan-looking color in the store for our bedroom. After painting, it looked deep yellow under our room's lighting, and I hated it for years.

5. Now go buy your paints. You should know which finish you want, and let the store guy pick the can. Certain color go with different paint bases and you'll get it wrong. Before you leave, make sure he didn't screw up by looking at the color sticker. The particular base paint should match the sticker.

6. Don't paint yet! When you get home, do as they do on those stupid home improvement shows, and put a good sized splotch on the wall. This is not pointless or for show. Let it dry, and look at it under different lights as above. Let it sit for a day or two. Look how the finish covers the wall - if you have walls in poor condition, a shiny finish is going to magnify those imperfections. If you do this before prepping and taping off the walls, it will have plenty of time to dry. If you hate it now, you've wasted a few bucks, but don't have to live with that color or finish for years.

7. Now paint. When you put it on at first, it will look way too light, and you'll think that picking the lighter shade in step 3 was a mistake. Be patient. It's going to dry one level darker, and when it's everywhere, it's going to feel one more level darker.

I tried to change my sig today and couldn't find it for about 10 minutes, because it's hidden behind a page that looks like documentation (not settings), inside a Web 2.0 in-browser miniature dialog box, and hidden below the fold accessible only by a nested scrollbar.

Help & Preferences? What the hell? Everyone knows help is totally useless, so we all mentally tune out everything that says "Help". You might as well change "Preferences" to be gray on gray.

Web programmers that use in-browser popups, animations, dialogs, fade-ins, and the worst: fake comboboxes that don't behave at all like real ones and have no keyboard access, should be shot. I'm looking at you, Facebook. Thank you.

Get off my lawn.

I always pay off my credit card bill on time, because I like Free Money. For years now, Discover and Citibank all send me $50 checks now and again for the privilege of using their money for a month. Hey, who am I to argue? This is how you get a FICO score in the 700s.

Every once in a while, something goes wrong. Most of the time it's just a brain fart on my part, and I just missed a payment. But sometimes electronic payments I really did make, just disappear into the ether, never to be heard from again... until the payee comes knockin' on your door.

Things have changes quite a bit since I started this in high school in 1988. Then, you would get a $10.00 late charge. Now they whack you with a $39.00 fee, and possibly raise your rate to 29%, charge you interest for this month and the next, raise rates on your other cards that are paid on time, and other assorted evil things that only MBAs and lawyers can think of. Clearly, they prefer gouging you for fees and really have no interest in you having your payment processed on time. But you already knew that.

Normally, if this happens, I just call up the company and whine a little bit, and try to get them to reverse the fee. Never act angry, just ask if the support droid can save your life Just This One Time and oh, thank you, you're so great! It's a bit like getting your first speeding ticket, do whatever you can to avoid that. If you can never get first late fee, then you always have a clean record, and they're more likely to forgive your "first" mistake. I can't remember the last time this has failed. Discover, in particular, has good service and always immediate start groveling a (who-cares-if-it's-faux) apology and revert it.

So, last month, I send a payment to Citibank on their website, and... poof. Gone to the great bit-bucket in the sky. I notice a few days later than my checking balance is a lot higher than it should be, and notice that payment is missing.

WHANGP! You could almost hear the $39 late fee landing on my account immediately, you know, like the big industrial metal stamp that breaks the underlying surface on those FordChevyWhatever truck commercials, leaving a pile of broken rubble and floating dust.

I log into Citibank, and sure enough, it's there. I haven't been late on any card in maybe 4 years, and probably this is the first time ever on Citibank. So, I call them up, whine, and ask to get it removed.

No sympathy. Sorry shithead, you're late, pay the piper.

Ah, you win some, you lose some. I'm up by a couple thousand, and they've got $50 out of me. Still worth playing.

So: this month. I'm all paid up, get my next bill, and what's this? Finance Charge? Out comes the phone again for another complaint. I know perfectly well that there's some legalese somewhere that allows them to do this, but I don't feel like reading 43 pages of legalese when I can call Ravi "Dave" Chandraskarapadmanaban in Bangalore and get the same answer in far less time. Turns out that if you're late you get finance charges for two months. You lose your grace period for a month.

The Indian lady on the phone offers to remove the second late fee. Bingo! Sensing that she was in a charitable mood, I press my luck. Without a beat, I immediately said that the original late fee was also charged wrong, and gave the same sob story again that failed to impress last month.

Bingo, she wipes out the late fee and last month's finance charge, in addition also this month's.

It pays to whine to your credit card company.

I just spent a week's vacation on Long Island, driving down an fabulously warm June day. As the kids finally lulled asleep, and I was listening to the radio, the usual happened: a motorcyclist with straight pipes comes up behind me about 90 mph, weaving around everyone in moderate traffic. Par for the course is obscene volume, waking up the entire family. Yes, with the windows closed and air conditioner on.

Motorcyclists are always pointing out that the majority of riders are law-abiding, considerate people, and it just merely seems like they're complete assholes. From the AMA position paper on noise:

A minority, riding loud motorcycles, may leave the impression that all motorcycles are loud.

I can buy that. I admit you usually are not going to notice people acting considerately. But is this really true? Or is it just spin from a bought-and-sold organization?

So, I decided to do a quick non-scientific experiment. For the rest of the 6-hour trip I decided to count the motorcyclists, to come up with an obnoxious to non-obnoxious ratio.

The results? Of thirty-nine motorcyclists I shared the road with, all but two either were driving unsafely (weaving in and out of traffic, splitting lanes), or extremely loud (meaning they had aftermarket exhausts, and thus are much louder than an average car with a functioning muffler at cruising speed). Usually both.

That's 94%. Hardly a "minority".

To be fair, about three or four passenger trucks did have aftermarket exhausts, and a pair of Mercedes were racing and weaving. But against the thousands of cars I shared the road with that that day, it's well under 94%. Well to the point of insignificance.

Am I an anti-biker? No, I'd love to learn some day. But I guarantee, when I do, my bike will be silent.

In the interest of fairness, note that I have defined "loud" here as "much louder than an average car with a functioning muffler". When driving in my car, the volume of nearly all other cars is underneath the threshold of the ambient noise inside the cabin: they are effectively silent. I still count them, because even a mildly-loud bike, which is audible but not obnoxious when listened to from inside a car, can be extremely loud in quieter circumstances. Say, if you're setting sitting on your back deck, and there's a road a mile away.

I guess it comes down to how you define excessive. I say motorcyclists should be no louder than your average car that passes inspection with a muffler. As it stands, a typical motorcycle is about loud as car driving around with it's horn stuck on. Yet would we stand for that behavior? Maybe next time I'm near see a pack of motorcyclists, I'll just lay on the horn too, to join the fun! Of how about I park in front my home town's police station, and sit on the horn and find out. Or: wouldn't it be great if no cars had mufflers at all, then everything would be so loud, nobody would stick out! Why is riding a motorcycle a free pass to antisocial behavior?

I'm going to take the Maddox pledge to annoying behavior. To all bikers with loud pipes: I am going to ignore you. I won't see you, I won't hear you. I don't care if I get a ticket or my insurance goes up.

This is a public service announcement, because I went crazy trying to figure this out myself. To run an older build of TightVNC on Fedora Core 5 and up (which includes Xorg 7.0+), you need to run with some extra options:

vncserver -fp unix/:7100 -co /usr/share/X11/rgb

Otherwise, you'll find that anything that refers to a color by a symbolic name shows black or white instead.

I'm lazy and don't want to build the TightVNC from source, so I use an old package targeted to Fedora Core 3.

Xorg moved the location of some files in 7.0 (from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/share) and TightVNC needs to know where to look for it, since it assumes you have a parallel X server installation.

I hope Google finds this and serves you well.

Thank the Lord. After... what, six months? More? It feels like about two years. I finally sold my old house. I'm still trying to decide whether this is the worst experience in my life, or just the second worst. It's a toss-up with jury duty.

Never trust real estate agents. Mine overshot the value of the home by $75,000, a 21% error. I'm now convinced they simply don't care. They make money by you selling. Thus, they are going to tell you whatever you need to hear to make you sell... including inflating the price.

Oh, maybe just that first agent had a bad time? How about three agents, all local, that I interviewed on the second round? They were only off by only $40,000.

I did everything they told me to do. You get a laundry list of things you must fix and should fix, and I did everything. I rebuilt a bathroom. New beige carpet. New deck. New plate glass. Paint everything off-white. Lots of landscaping work. New fixtures. Replaced a lot of trim. Redecorate everything. Removed the screen. New closet doors. Clean the windows. Make every room practically empty. It went on and on, for months.

I knew the agent was getting desperate, and a bit silly, when very late in the process he said I should replace the kitchen faucet with a fancy stainless one. The kitchen faucet? You mean all the people that came in, would not buy the house... because of the kitchen faucet? I even did it, but I was thinking to myself: this is really stupid. Grasping at straws.

In the end, not a single buyer cared. They all said the same thing: "busy road, don't like the driveway".

Many times, I find myself on the run between work and gigs. Traffic around Boston can be insane, so inevitably I have to choke down some fast food. Not for price, but for speed.

If you do the obvious thing, it will cost you about $7 for one of those so-valued "value" meals. Surely, we can do better. If you're going to suffer the insult of eating crappy food, why overpay for it? You can get a dinner for about $2. Here's how:

First, I usually have access to soda at work or at home. Before I leave, I usually just grab a soda and bring it along. You might pay $1 or so for a soda at Burger King, but soda is a high-profit item for them. You can get soda in a store for less than $3 a 12-pack in convenient can form. Or skip it altogether- though admittedly this is hard to do at McDonalds, as their burgers seem to lodge in your throat and require a drink.

Most fast food joints have a value menu. Know it and love it! Burger King and Wendy's have the better ones, and you can get a small burger loaded with toppings for 99 cents each. Pick two items, three if you're really hungry.

Skip the cheese. Why does cheese cost 20-50 cents a slice? Because most people will say "sure" if you ask if they want cheese because it seems small, not realizing that you are paying a lot for that.

Skip the fries, too. Another entree is more filling for the same price.

Keep an eye on the menu, and never order without reading it. This menu changes from day to day, hoping to catch the unwary. Things move in and out of the value menu all the time. That same Whopper Jr. might now be $1.59 this week, based on some biz guy's profit maximization plan.

There you go. Dinner or lunch for $2 plus tax, and you get to clean up all those pennies sitting in your center console.

You may think now that you upgraded to a nice LCD you won't get any burn-in like on your CRT.

I noticed the other day, after working a few hours on a score, than I had ghost images, dark spots. all over my Samsung 191T. I like a very dark and boring background (blue or purple).

At work, I have a Viewsonic VX2000 (an incredible monitor!) and a NEC MultiSync 1830, both of which are seemingly impervious to this.

It seems the LCD pixels get "tired" even faster than phosphors do, though the damage seems not to be permanent. However, it's quite annoying since I tend to have the monitor on for the entire day. If I'm working on a large score for a long time I get very bad ghosting.

I did have a screen saver, and the monitor powers off after a few minutes of inactivity. Still no good.

Unlike CRTs, LCD pixels are resting when displaying a totally white image. However, most screen savers are on a black background.

If you want to really give your monitor a rest, set a screensaver to have a totally white screen. On Windows, the "blank screen" saver will not work, so use the "Marquee" saver.

Finally, powering down at night by turning it off seems to help. Normally I would leave it on and let it go into power-save mode, but it appears it's not the same.

A couple years ago, if you put my name into Google you'd get my (admittedly lame) vanity page. Maybe about a year ago, this stopped happening - instead, you'd get my profile on SourceForge. That was annoying, of course, I want people to get my own page when they look for me.

What happened?

Turns out I used to have a link to tringali.org on my Slashdot comments. I took that down one day, because I thought it would be better to split my handle from my name. Not that anyone can't find out my real name from my handle or vice-versa, but just to make it less obvious.

Turns out that's what killed it. I put the link back and, bang, I'm back at the top. Behold the power of Slashdot, and wield your homepage link with care.

So much for my, ah, secret identity.

Like everyone else, I'm awash in spam. All the names are fake of course, though we seemed to have lately changed over from really bad ones like "Asymmetric Q. Palindrome" to more normal looking names. All these names seem to be totally random, with no two messages coming from the same one.

Except two: Stefan Zdanski and Karen Valdez. Over and over, these two names are reused in the sender column, subject, body. Years pass. Ice ages come and go. But Stefan and Karen are still there, clogging my inbox.

I got sick of it long ago and put a filter on those names. But every once in a blue moon I check the spam folder and... well, hello Karen! Nice to see you again! It's like I'm being stalked.

This raises some questions:

Does everyone get mail from these two? Or has somehow a spammer decided that I have my own two private imaginary friends? If it's just me, are the world's spammers so organized that they have a special list of two fake names to use for my email address? For what purpose? Perhaps these are real people, joe-jobbed by spammers? Or maybe the patron saints of spam? Anagrams of something? Someone help me!