There is hope yet...

On the way to this morning's date with my air-to-ground headset, I saw the traffic ahead of me on Bay Area Boulevard in Webster come to a halt for no apparent reason. No stop light, no stop sign, no cop directing traffic.

No, it turns out that folks on this 6-lane road came to a stop to allow a squirrel to cross the road.

I suspect that, had this squirrel's travel plans been delayed 24 hours or so, the result might not have been so happy. On the other hand, it's nice to see a sort of "stop-and-smell-the-roses" bent come over a bunch of people situated in the same place at the same time.

Cheers...

Purposeless...

Telling the Mandrake install program to do its thing in Russian gave me little more than instructions in Russian to guide me through the install.

Upon completion of the install, the system rebooted and proceeds to automatically load X Windows (one recalls this cropping up once before, as described in my very first LJ post, but I digress...).

There are, however, two problems with such behavior. Primo, declaring my monitor to be a plain vanilla VGA device wasn't generic enough. The image on the screen is tripled...I suspect the word "interlacing" might be employed if we got technical about describing the problem. If I move my mouse, changes occur on several places on the screen.

Segundo, despite the display problem, it is apparent I'm not getting any Cyrillic on the screen. All I see is '?' characters...that is, what I can see of them.

What to do?

I manage to log in as root. I open an xterm using Alt-F2. I edit /etc/inittab in the blind to set the initial runlevel to 3. I reboot the machine.

Hooray! X is no longer loaded by default. However, there does not seem to be anything special about the console login. On the Linux box in Pagosa, I have a script set up to let me toggle character sets. No joy in that department, here.

Oh, well...it's not as if I expected something miraculous. Since I do not have scads of valuable files stored on the box, I think I shall reinstall...and this time maybe I will use a "standard" distro instead of Mandrake's Linux for Windows. Who knows...maybe I should try out FreeBSD?

Lunch should be ready...

Cheers...

Goodbye MP3??

From an article on ZDNet News titled Tech giants out to ambush MP3:

Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system, Windows XP. But music recorded in the Redmond, Wash., software company's own format, called Windows Media Audio, will sound clearer and require far less storage space on a computer.
...
"The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed
[...]. The consumer is going to eat what
he's given," says David Farber, the former
chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission.

The article goes on to say that Windows XP will limit MP3 recording to 56 kbps, though I cannot understand how they might impose this restriction on third party developers. OTOH, Microsoft has been giving away free licenses to other companies to use its audio technology, and that word "free" just may have had a small string or two attached.

BTW, that Windows Media Audio format, if I'm not mistaken, is the one whose file format has been patented by Microsoft, requiring any software designed to decode the format to be licensed from Redmond. Whoo-ee!

Cheers...

I hate cliffhangers...

Tonight's episode of The X Files was fine, but there are so many questions left to be resolved next week that it's annoying. The teaser at the end of the show ("one life will begin...another life will end") just tightens the screws.

Very little makes sense, which is why (as I've said many times previous) I like the series. You'd think that folks'd want to shoot Alex Krycek as soon as look at him, but there he is, providing us viewers with yet another view of the world. I would not be surprised to see him turn out to be a hero when all is said and done.

In any event, there is nothing left to do but clean away the dirty dishes and wait until next Sunday. I suppose any news of Yet Another Season will not be announced until we're well into reruns. Frankly, I like the series even more ever since Robert Patrick was added to the cast. (The only thing I'd like better is to see Mulder set himself up as a consultant and work the X files under contract with the FBI..at a concomitantly higher rate of pay, natch. But I've got NASA on my mind, I guess. :^)

Cheers...