if you keep a blog and nobody reads it, does it still make a sound?

I don't doubt it.

http://despair.com/yourblog.html

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Nothing says summer in New England like a perfect night at Fenway Park!

The Red Sox beat the Florida Marlins 8-2.

"Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker"

Anyone who has ever installed an Apache web server on a Linux machine will get a good laugh from this. It was in 2006, but it's worth reposting.

Thanks to http://twitter.com/philipdurbin/ for posting it on Twitter.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/

licorice

Changing the subject entirely, let me just state for the record how much I love licorice. Not Twizzlers, but real licorice, especially the Dutch variety. At the moment I am particularly fond of the Geldlijn line from Klene.

My current favorite is their "Grof Geld":

It's a little sweet, a little salty, medium-soft-chewy, and bursting with licorice flavor. My friend who lives in the Netherlands brought me some, and I get it in the U.S. from Holland's Best. Klene also makes "Zakkenrollers":


but I've been unable to find them for sale in the U.S.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember that I'm also quite fond of these:



I first discovered them at Cardullo's, but I see they can also be ordered by the case from Holland's Best.
I've also been fond of the (German) Haribo Wheels and Gustaf's Traditional Dutch Licorice Drops.

Friends have told me of the bulk licorice stalls at the open-air markets in the Netherlands. I would really love to visit some of those.

kwin it is!

"Next time" for this problem arrived rather quickly. kwin started spewing errors almost nonstop, like

kwin: (0x40d6b527): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: (0xcd613f): BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
kwin: (0x40d6b526): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: X_FreePixmap(0x40d6b527): BadPixmap (invalid Pixmap parameter)
kwin: (0xcd614d): BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
kwin: (0x40d6b526): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: X_PutImage(0x40d6b532): BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
kwin: X_FreeGC(0x40d6b520): BadGC (invalid GC parameter)
kwin: (0xcd639c): BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
kwin: (0x40d6b520): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: (0xcd6414): BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
kwin: (0x40d6b52e): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: (0x40d6b520): BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
kwin: (0xcd641e): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: (0xcd641e): RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
kwin: X_FreePixmap(0x40d6b520): BadPixmap (invalid Pixmap parameter)
kwin: X_FreeGC(0x40d6ad33): BadGC (invalid GC parameter)
kwin: X_FreeGC(0x40d6ad38): BadGC (invalid GC parameter)

And then the garbage window decorations reappeared. Killed and started kwin and the problem goes away!

Info:
% kwin -v
Qt: 3.3.8b
KDE: 3.5.10
KWin: 3.0

Kubuntu package: 4:3.5.10-0ubuntu1~hardy2

The memory use monitoring was inconclusive because I started it only a couple of hours before this "reset". Continuing to gather statistics.

kwin the culprit?

I think I have localized the source of my display woes. Noting that the problem manifests in part as garbage in the window decorations, I thought of kwin, the window manager, which to the best of my knowledge is responsible for managing window decorations. Last time the problem occurred, I killed kwin and started a new one. That did indeed clear the problem, so I just had to wait and see how long the fix would last.

It's now been several days! That is longer than I've ever managed to recover before. I think this might be it. I'm monitoring the memory usage of kwin now to see if I can blame a memory leak. It sure has that feel about it.

As an aside, it was amusing to try to restart kwin after killing it. Killing it took away the ability to switch the window focus, which was not in a terminal! I ended up having to use the mouse to copy and paste individual characters k w i n into a shell. Next time I'll set it up beforehand.

Is my misery due to X.org, KDE, or Kubuntu?

I am a long-time Linux fan and have been a happy Kubuntu user (I prefer KDE's configurability to Gnome's) since Breezy Badger. After upgrading to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), however, my system has exhibited an exasperating tendency to require a reboot about once per week. After several days of use, the GUI becomes rather sluggish, and the window decorations start dissolving into garbage images for seconds at a time before being restored to their proper forms (i.e. full-screen, iconify, etc.). Sometimes I can get it to stop by closing Firefox, kmail, pidgin, etc. and restarting them. But it always ends in tears. Eventually the GUI grinds to a halt and the X server crashes so badly that the machine requires a reboot.

I have taken to logging out and logging back in (thus restarting X) at the first sign of this behavior, which is excruciating due to my use of 4 displays and 9 virtual desktops, typically covered with dozens of windows for the different projects I'm doing. Even with KDE's Save/Restore Session feature, it's painful to set everything up again.

I've been struggling to fix this since it started, but have had little success. Regular work seems to get in the way. I will readily admit to some embarrassment about "living" like this. I'm supposed to be a crack computer engineer!

It's hard to remember all the things I've tried, but here are some:

• upgrading to Kubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 (fail, but that's another story)
• tracking memory usage in the X server (I might have found a memory leak but the problem happens even when X memory usage doesn't grow)
• fooling with xorg.conf options for my 3 different video cards

I learned a lot, but didn't solve it.

Things I haven't tried but should:

• try Gnome, KDE in another dist, xfce, or my nostalgic favorite, fvwm
• disable one video card at a time to try to localize the problem to a particular driver
• enable debugging output for various components of the display system

"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch"*

*Jane Wagner

Blogging, eh? I tried this once before but even I got bored reading it! I'm trying again though. Welcome to my corner of reality, where I am (according to my Twitter profile) a geek, an engineer, a scientist, a dad, a gourmand, a music lover, a Red Sox fan, a lousy hockey player, a narcissistic lemming, and a vapid bleater.

I hope you find something entertaining or even (gasp!) useful in here.