Dive Into Mark Again

June 3rd, 2006 • Comments Off Asides

Mark Pilgrim happens to be one of my all-time favorite bloggers. I was so sorry he was gone away for a while. He authored Dive Into Python, Dive Into Greasemonkey, and the Universal Feed Parser.

Maybe it’s two months too late to say this, but I’m very happy Mark’s back on my feed list. Thank you Mark.

Fixing Skype Sound Problems on Linux

May 9th, 2006 • 5 comments Asides, Linux

Skype’s backend is based on OSS. This causes Skype to have many problems with full-duplexing. OSS is fairly old, I think it already served it’s purpose and served it well, but that’s about enough, move on to ALSA already.

On Linux, Skype’s not a very good citizen, so if you’re getting “Problem with sound device” errors and “/dev/dsp-1: Device or resource busy” errors, here’s what to do:

• Install alsa-oss package, wraps around software that uses OSS and makes it ALSA-compatible. Most distributions (at least Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch) call this package the same.
• Run aoss /usr/bin/skype
• (Optional) Rename /usr/bin/skype and put a bash script in its place to run aoss
• Enjoy free calls!

Update: You don’t need to this anymore because Skype have already released an ALSA-compatible version for Linux. Let’s go nuts.

Pretty Good Age Guesser

April 24th, 2006 • Asides

Nothing big, but I came across this age guesser, looks pretty good.

And yes, it guessed 23, a couple of months more, but what the hell.

Define Turnkey

March 13th, 2006 • Asides, General

Turnkey \Turn”key`\, n.; pl. Turnkeys.

1. A person who has charge of the keys of a prison, for opening and fastening the doors; a warder.

2. (Dentistry) An instrument with a hinged claw, — used for extracting teeth with a twist.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICR

Thanks to Buzzsaw.

Random Highlights

March 8th, 2006 • Asides, General

• Seth’s video takes away 48 minutes of your time. Don’t interrupt. Make sure you watch it.
• Getting Real by 37 Signals is what I’m reading right now. I love the clean layout, but I haven’t finished yet, so I can’t post a review.
• Zend’s framework seems to be the hype in the PHP world these days. My god I’ve been away for long, probably too long. Have a look at Harry’s post.
• This little distro is becoming a favorite of mine. It’s minimalistic, amazingly snappy, and has all the package that work. BSD-style boot scripts though, not a big deal, but watch out for it.
• Gentoo 2006.0 is released. There’s a live CD with an installer. I’m having a feeling that I’m not going to use it anyway. I’m sure Gentoo can be made just as simple as Arch (Archoo?), probably needs a binary repos.
• Digital, Intel and Xerox are DIX!