Today, I decided to upgrade my mixed Debian Squeeze/Sid box to KDE 4.2.2. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to boot into KDE with two monitors attached using radeonhd, kwin repeatedly crashed. I found the following error in the .xsession-errors log file:

kwin: ../../src/xcb_io.c:542: _XRead: Assertion `dpy->xcb->reply_data != ((void *)0)' failed.

I eventually figured out (after several hours of debugging) that the libGL.so.2 on my system was the one provided by the closed source fglrx / Catalyst driver and *not* mesa. A quick

sudo aptitude reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx

and everything works great.

Posted in the hopes that the next guy with this problem finds it and saves a few hours of googling.

Josh

To the DJs and management at "The Highway":

Be quiet. Please; I beg of you; be quiet. Sirius Satellite Radio advertises "100% Commercial Free Music." Yet, I constantly hear commercials on your station for the various features you offer. Rarely does an hour go by without advertisements for some random radio gimmick or "Driver's Ed," which, by the way, is insulting to your audience and to the new artists who endure it.

The idea behind the Sirius advertisement is that you play more music with less interruptions than your terrestrial counter-parts. This simply isn't the case. Rather than interrupt with commercial messages, it seems that "The Highway" prefers to place annoying anecdotes from the station personalities between each and every song. What's worse is that the interruptions are centered around an annoying and pervasive highway theme with metaphors and puns stretched to the point of absurdity. I don't want to hear about "road blocks," "mile markers," or "detours." I want to hear music.

Also, please stop playing station identification slogans and jingles between virtually every song. As far as I can tell, every radio Sirius sells has a nice display which clearly indicates the name of the channel one is listening to. Why, exactly, are you telling me every 4 minutes or so the exact same information that I have right in front of my face?

Also, please tell your DJs to respect the music they are playing. Not only do your DJs delay the music that I have tuned in to hear with their annoying on-air personalities, but they often do so by talking directly over the introductory part of a song itself. A song starts with the first note, not with the beginning of the lyrics. If the artist had intended the lyrics to be the first thing the audience could clearly hear, the artist wouldn't have bothered to include the prelude at all.

I know this seems like a lot to take in, so let me try to summarize: Play music. Thats all I want you to do - play music. If you occasionally feel the need to tell your audience about some event,I guess thats just part of the business. But please keep these interruptions as short and free from time-wasting material as possible.

Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter,
Josh.

Update:I eventually cancelled my Sirius subscription due to problems like those above. I may reactivate it if they make a good enough offer, but nothing close has happened by my inbox yet.

To whom it may concern:

alert (ə-ˈlərt\): an urgent notice; an alarm or other signal of danger.

An alert, as the above definition borrowed from Merriam Webster clearly indicates, is not something that we should hear every day or even every year unless we live a particularly dangerous life.Yet, your news organization has made a habit of issuing official sounding alerts, complete with custom computer graphics and sound effects, for every minor news event that happens to cross a copywriter's mind.

For example, this very morning I heard one of your morning anchors transition from some frivolous piece of pseudo-journalism directly to a "Fox News Alert" that breathlessly implied that some major breaking news was imminent with regard to the Roland Burris scandal. However, in the ensuing report,the correspondent clearly stated that no activity was expected until more than two hours later and even then the expected activity was a highly scripted and symbolic nonevent that cameras wouldn't be allowed to record.

Please tell me precisely what was so urgent about telling your audience that nothing of particular interest was happening or going to happen for at least two hours that it necessitated the issuance of an alert.

Perhaps even more annoying than the issuance of "alerts" for absolute nonevents is the continued reissuance of these alerts when events continue to not happen. I can't count the number of times I've listened intently after hearing "This is a Fox News Alert" only to hear the same piece of information the anchor has been repeating ad nauseum for hours regurgitated in a slightly different order.

Don't get me wrong: I am actually a fan of Fox News and I enjoy having a more balanced alternative to the massive liberal media that dominates most of the other channels, but please realize that sensationalist overuse of gimmicks like the "Fox News Alert" is causing at least one loyal viewer to watch less and less.

Regards,
Josh

Having enjoyed the theatrical release of "Transformers," my wife and I decided to purchase the DVD upon its release. Tonight, we drove 20 minutes across town to the local store to purchase it so we could enjoy watching it again at home.

Upon inspecting the box, I noticed a little logo with the text "This DVD is copy-protected." Though I can find little online about the subject, the fact that the DVD may contain DRM above and beyond the easily defeated CSS caused me to sit it back on the shelf and walk out of the store without purchasing it. Movie studio executives can't be that smart, so let me be very clear: DRM cost you a sale. Josh wanted to buy it. Josh saw DRM. Josh didn't buy it.

Great Job MPAA! I am exactly your target demographic. I have disposable income, I made a special trip to a store to buy your product and your inclusion of DRM turned me from someone eager to give you money to someone who will tell everyone he knows *not* to buy the product.

By the way, there are already dozens of Transformers torrents out there. It truly makes one wonder: When will the massive media companies learn that they can only compete with piracy by offering a superior product at a fair price. Though this particular DVD was fairly priced at $15, the fact that it contains DRM instantly makes it inferior to the dozens of torrents of the same product available at this very moment.

I sincerely hope the product does not contain DRM as I would honestly like to own it, but Dreamworks won't be seeing a penny of my money until I know one way or the other.

For those of you unfamilar with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), check out Defective By Design by the Free Software Foundation.

Anyone that knows me know thats I go to great lengths to avoid using closed source software. Increasingly, I'm becoming aware of how limiting closed source hardware is as well. Take, for example, the Sirius satellite radio receiver I use in my car on a daily basis.

The designers at Sirius added a neat feature to the device that alerts you when a song or clip you've marked in memory comes on a different station than the one you are currently listening to. So, if I'm listening to Andrew Wilkow and a great song by Five Iron Frenzy happens to come on one of the Christian music channels, the device beeps and gives me the option of switching to that channel. My radio also allows me to pause content and resume listening to it later, so long as the radio doesn't power down. Unfortunately, if you are playing content delayed and you choose to respond to one of these alerts, it just throws away the remainder of the program you have cached and switches to the live broadcast of the alerting item.

A while back, I wrote a simple plugin for MythTV that gathers movie show time data from a SOAP web service provided by ignyte.com. The idea behind the plugin is simple: being lazy. A month or so ago, that plugin was accepted into the official mythplugins package over at mythtv.org. I can't take too much credit for it as its design is borrowed heavily from the great MythVideo and MythMusic plugins and ignyte.com provided the data source, but those of you who are lazy and happen to have a mythbox may want to check it out anyway.

Its not in a release version yet, but building myth from SVN should include it. For those of you uncomfortable with source code, it should be included in MythTV 0.21 (not due for a while). Rumor has it there are some bleeding edge deb packages out there that contain it, but I haven't verified this myself.If you do check it out, enjoy and let me know if you run into any issues.

Fark.com pointed me to an absolutely hilarious "The Daily Show" video clip over at Comedy Central. You can check it out on their site in an annoying media player window here or access it directly on my server. Its a "School House Rock" style view of the midterm elections, and its well worth the few minutes it'll take you to watch it.

TechCrunch has another good article today discussing a new product in the cell phone market. Newcomer Loopt is making waves by allowing groups of friends to track one another's physical locations via cell phone with automated alerts, mapping, etc. Currently, only Boost Mobile is supported, but other providers are rumored to be available soon.

I have to admit - the service does have some great legitimate uses such as parents tracking their kids, friends choosing to allow each other to be found, etc. However, it also has some startling privacy implications. Should Home Depot be told I just walked into a Menards so they can text message me a solicitation to use their store instead? Its certainly an interesting development.

Techchrunch has a story about Amazon unveiling their new Unbox.com online video rental/purchase service. So far, reactions to the service are underwhelming with complaints of high prices (Downloads costing more than purchasing the DVD) and privacy concerns.

Personally, I won't be using it at all due to my stance against DRM.

GeekPress has an entertaining refresher course on the common Logical Fallacies that always seem to creep into otherwise interesting debates. One thing I'd like to note is that the slippery slope logical fallacy is actually a valid argument in some instances - particularly in cases regarding legal matters.

Due to the impact of legal precedent, case decisions may have an important or decisive role in any or all future cases that are demonstrably similiar if not identical. In this way, it is logically sound to argue a "slippery slope" can begin when a legal decision is made. For example, if judge Y rules that action A is constitutionally protected, judge X may be required to rule that action B is also constitutionally protected if it is demonstrably similiar to action A.

This is one reason why I despise the suppression of speech in any form, even when the content of that speech is vile or dangerous. If the government can label something as "too dangerous to say," there is effectively no barrier to prevent them from labeling perfectly safe and logical speech that happens to go against their interest in this manner.