A great video on skeptical thinking. I recommend that everyone watches it even if you think you’re a critical thinker already.
Canadian copyright bill
Well here it comes.
UPDATE: This will make criminals out of every Canadian that uses a digital media player.
Bill C-61
Stupid packages
So I somehow broke OpenGL on my Gentoo desktop yesterday. I noticed it because my screensaver stopped working. It’s the only thing that uses GL all the time. So I started trying various things to fix the problem such as good old revdep-rebuild. It immediately complains about freeglut having a problem and tries to emerge it. Then I get a wonderfully generic error, “ld: cannot find -lGL”. Great, the linker can’t find a file and is complaining that it’s arguments are the file and it can’t find them. So what file is it looking for and why can’t the linker find it.
After much reading about lots of things that didn’t seem to apply I found one that was close. It said to try and update which OpenGL libraries are being used via eselect. “eselect opengl list” will show you what it thinks it has. “eselect opengl set #” will assign which library to use. It complained that it couldn’t find openGL.so. A-ha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Well you can find it as a symbolic link at /usr/lib/openGL.so and it links to /usr/lib/openGL.so.1 and that doesn’t exist. So I created a symbolic link /usr/lib/openGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib/libGL.so and BINGO! everything now works.
What a pain in the ass and how did the symbolic link to that file get deleted in the first place???
Well it’s fixed and only wasted about 4 hours of my life really fixing something that isn’t even terribly relevant to my job BUT my screensaver works again. 🙂
Damn you Scalzi!
So yesterday I started reading “Old Man’s Wars” by John Scalzi. I have been meaning to read this book for a while and even got a free copy of it in pdf form from Tor books. I had a hard time walking away from it once I started reading and had an even harder time falling asleep. Well I just finished it. I can’t remember the last time I tore through a book like that. It has similar feel to the “Hammer’s Slammers” series by David Drake but is completely different at the same time.
Now I need to get Scalzi’s other books but then I won’t get any of my other reading done.
I created a Facebook account out of curiosity. I didn’t intended to use it but before the day was out, two people I know ha added me as a friend. It then became a bit of a social networking experiment. I decided that I wouldn’t seek out anyone to add as a friend and see how long it took for people to find me. It has been an interesting little experiment that proved absolutely nothing. Interesting by seeing the people that found me. I was surprised to see the people that did, some of whom I haven’t talked to in years. The problem is that I don’t like Facebook’s privacy policies. I also find social networking sites to start breaking down after they reach a critical mass. Lastly, I find that people stop talking about their lives when I see them in person because they assume everyone has read everything via (insert web site here). I have avoided much of that in the past couple of years by avoiding social networking sites. On the other hand there are people that I wouldn’t mind being in better contact with and the only way I can achieve that is by diving back into the social grinder.
I just know that if I dip my toe in the networking cesspool, I’ll get dragged in. Cesspool is probably too harsh a word but you get my point.