staying.cool

having spent 3 hours of my life in trying to get a dual-monitor setup + compiz on ubuntu 8.10, i have come to the conclusion that it is simply impossible.

[note: this is on a machine with 2 X300SE ATI cards which are connected to a dell (1280x1024) and a sony (1024x768).]
observations:

• ATI+ubuntu = configuration hell. always has been and always will be. make it the seventh hell of hells when you add a dual-head setup into the mix. nvidia (from all the forums) is apparently much nicer.

• ubuntu natively picks up my monitors + resolutions. impressive.
• compiz appears to need the restricted ATI drivers to even work, on this latest iteration. once they are in there, it just works (on a single screen setup). beautifully. memories of spending 5 hours grappling with xorg.conf are sweet mythology.
• if one ditches compiz, and sticks to the open-source drivers, there’s still no scope of managing to ensure that different monitors run at different resolutions, and all work together to form a single desktop. the sony seems like the screen is extending way beyond the actual monitor with icons somewhere in the air above it.
• the ATI catalyst GUI sucks. cannot set up monitors at different resolutions, does not understand how to arrange monitors, ends up setting up the 2 monitors as a single LARGE widescreen, $^%#^&^$…
• default for all graphics configs (initially) is to clone outputs on both screens all the time. why?
• due to this lack of configurability, i have to either downgrade res to 1024×768 on both and have wonky compiz effects, or not have compiz at all.
• i somehow managed to enable a 2560×1024 (don’t ask) screen expanding across both monitors, to find that my cards only support upto 2048×2048 (ok, this is slightly invalid, but i was highly frustrated by this point anyway). ergo, compiz still won’t work.
• ubuntu without compiz effects seems dinky to use, and somehow extremely non-intuitive without all the flashiness.

now, while i’ve always been a fan of the terminal and all the cool commands that you pull out of the hat in linux… why isn’t there even an alt-tab command in linux? or any apparently simple way to set it up? compiz has ultra-funky features, and ubuntu has…nothing? what sense does that make?

incidentally, i had to reboot after an update (first time ever, for a non-kernel update). nasty memory of windows rebooting in the middle of my experiments ensued.

i’m impressed with the ease of setup. ubuntu has come streets ahead since i used it last in 7.10. lack of user-interface customization tells. big time.

solution: back to winxp with ultramon installed. such simplicity. maybe i will now move to winvista-32 or 64 on this machine, just for the heck of it.

crossover works great though, installed office 2007 directly on ubuntu. very cool. too bad the one thing keeping me on windows is the customization, rather than office.

is this all it comes down to? destruction and rioting due to justice being meted out to one of the worst communal leaders since… his predecessor? first fuck around with every possible community, claiming that the worlds largest melting pot is rightfully belonging to the nearest state. and then hold the city to ransom. all it shows is how little bombay (or in their words, mumbai) means to you.

sometimes i think my grandfather had it right: “line them all up in front of a shooting squad, and fire. the only way any of them will ever see sense. and learn discipline.”

update: an interesting thought-provoking letter from the man himself. [via ubert]

the k’s and the a’s have it: ektaaaa kaaapooor has done it. she has reinvented the greatest epic of our time. to the greatest maahaaa epic of our time. the wikipedia admits it: the six-pack, the half body armor, the musculature have been inherited, nay, evolved from 300.

our story begins in a galaxy far, far away.. where dice is played by men. we know they are real, true men as they all flaunt six-pack flabs, and stare moodily into space while dialogues are screamed. the skies scream, whether in protest we are not informed, but they scream. a real true man acting like a half-gay hyena (shenzi, banzai or ed?) - read shakuni - cackles in glee when he lands a 2 and a 1 with some ancient looking dice. a real true man broods moodily, rather.. continues to brood, while words are screamed at him. a hand comes into focus… and our new sherkar - read duryodhan - gestures in his direction.

one listens for the ‘govinda’ chant.. but then we get ahead of ourselves.

6, this time. right in the heart of delhi. so many dead, so many more injured.

and normal life continues. the ’spirit’ lives on, or something.

it will never end. we couldn’t care less. is this the final victory that the terrorists have aimed for ? an india that doesn’t care about her own ?

a year and 60 days after my warranty expires, the nvidia 8400GM graphics card on my hp laptop has fried. no matter that i have pointed out to HP more than once that the laptop does get pretty warm, and i have been using a  cooling pad/table since. no matter that graphics cards should only get fried if i really abuse them. no matter that hp’s solution to all problems is to have me send it to them, so that they can do nothing at all. maybe i should have done it earlier. maybe i should have lived without a computer for 15 days while finally tell me i need to use a cooling pad. the support team was pretty nice though, and very helpful. i am just pissed at the quality of the laptop build. $1250 for this ?

what does matter is that this laptop has been pretty jinxed from the word ‘go’. i wonder if this is a hint to move to a super-powered desktop. maybe this one. or, even better, this one.

i sad

why would apple expect the iphone 3G with its unsurpassably (crappy) features:

Surprisingly, some of the niggling features that were missing in the iPhone 1.0 continue to be overlooked. There’s still no copy-paste functionality, no MMS sending, no Flash capabilities, no A2DP (stereo Bluetooth)… Yes, at Rs.31,000 and thereabouts, the iPhone dangles a hefty price tag…if you take your eyes off its $199 pricing in the US and judge the iPhone purely on the heft of what you’re acquiring in terms of a gizmo, perhaps the picture won’t look so disappointing after all. After all, when has Apple ever sold sundar, tikaoo maal that was sasta — especially in India? Woefully however, the carrier lock-in story for the handset continues… You won’t be able to swap Vodafone to Airtel to Idea willy-nilly –– or when you are travelling abroad, to Matrix to SingTel. You will have to stick to that very Voda/Airtel SIM you’ve plugged into iPhone even in your wanderlust. That, for a 31K phone, is a mite distressing.

to be so wanted in india ? the country where the N96 is to be launched early. seriously. you might as well ship them all back to the US and keep selling them to people who have close to no idea just how convergent a device a phone can be.