Copy This

I picked up Radiohead’s “Hail To The Thief” on Friday, and when I first flipped it over and looked at the case, I got a bit concerned. Plastered in the upper-left corner is a warning label about it being “copy controlled” and a hardware compatibility chart and probably subliminal messages about how if you pirate it rabid weasels will eat your eyes out or something. Well nuts, I didn’t want to buy an album I couldn’t rip, since I just toss the CDs into a big box in the closet now.

This was the first time I’d encountered a ‘copy protected’ CD though, so I was curious and took it home anyway. A half-hour later I had 14 error-free MP3s on my drive. However, other people who bought it legitimately haven’t had as much luck even with regular CD players.

What was the point of all this again?

gcc -c red_pill.c

I don’t do any 3D work or gaming under Linux so I’d never bothered to install the full OpenGL drivers for my Radeon card (the default XFree86 drivers only do 2D), but I stayed up late last night finally getting them working *just* so I could run the GLMatrix module of xscreensaver.

I am beyond help. :-)

Sunk While Docking

The desktop/window manager war is driving me nuts sometimes. Being a crotchety old geek I can live with most of it, but I can just imagine the following conversation taking place…

“Hey, I just started this program and I’ve got this extra icon floating around here. What’s with this?”
“Oh that’s the dock icon. It just displays a convenient status summary in the window manager’s dock.”
“Um, shouldn’t it actually be *in* the dock then?”
“Well, normally yes. That’s a Qt program, not GTK, and you’re running GNOME aren’t you?”
“Yes I am, but it says it’s GNOME-compatible.”
“Which version are you using?”
“The latest 2.x, of course.”
“Oh, well, they changed the window manager in that version. It doesn’t have that dock anymore.”
“What do I do then?”
“Maybe there’s a preference or command-line option or something somewhere that can turn it off or something…”
“But, when I start some other programs they display their own icon in the upper-right menubar corner. Isn’t that the dock?”
“Well, yes, but it’s a different *kind* of dock…”
“AAAAAAUGGH!!!”