[Edu-sig] Hello, I'm Tim...

[Kirby Urner]

> Yeah I had to switch to Windows. Sound on Linux doesn't work, because
> the version of Alsa that Mandrake 10.0 came with doesn't have support
> for my sound card and there's no RPM for a newer version and compiling
> it didn't work. If I took the time to upgrade, I would get a new
> version. Also Totem Media Player, which Mandrake uses by default,
> doesn't work with WMVs very well (it tryed downloading a plugin, but
> nothing happened) for some reason.
> 
> Tim.

OK, back from Salem.  It's a fine town (got a lot done too), although I must
say, Tacoma is really coming along.  Our family made a side trip into Tacoma
over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Off topic:  some slides from that side trip:
http://tinyurl.com/3htra (the weird metal volcano that appears so many times
is the outer hull of a glassworks -- part of the Museum of Glass, these
being outside shots of it taken on my little Fujifilm 2600).

Tim and I swapped a lot of emails on this sound card issue.  He quickly
burrowed down to the metal, figuring out which chipset Dell was using, and
what he'd need to do to make ALSA work.  I suggested grabbing just the ALSA
rpms from a 10.1 (vs. the 10.0 he's using -- Mandrake), but then it didn't
seem the right drivers were in there or something.  Anyway, the annoying
thing was in the beginning, when the configuration caused major melt downs.
Having no sound, but no melt downs either, proved acceptable, until some
future upgrade.  Doesn't interfere with the ILP, which is the point right
now.

> --
> Visit my website: (and please be a supporter of free trade, free
> software, phr33 s0ftware, free dom, and free propoganda by giving
> others the url) http://kmg.is-a-geek.org
> Garunteed to be down at least 5% of the time.
> 

For those of you who've maybe visited, the whole blog thing is implemented
in Python.  Tim has tweaked and expanded Pybloxsom in various ways (the blog
documents some of those accomplishments).  The calendar cgi is also Python.
And he's been switching over from raw cgi to a mod_python based approach,
which is something I'm behind on.  I'm hoping he'll give me a quick overview
at official meeting #2.

Kirby