I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04
and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10
and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to
usable as I could see it in lsusb
binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
binder@death:~$
and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and
found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver
via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions,
I could see it recognized in dmesg:
[ 31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[ 31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[ 31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera
So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it
to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:
Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0).
Please check connection.
And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch
more information:
binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP -- could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....
Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using
multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed,
was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group.
So I added my user account to group video with:
sudo adduser binder video
and all is right with the world.
posted at 21:04 PDT (-0700)
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Today we bought a mattress from a woman I wouldn't have wanted to have in
bed (no offense). This reminds me of how the barber on ST:TNG had no hair
and how one is told to never trust a thin cook. But on the plus side, new
mattress coming soon. BOUNCIE BOUNCIE!
So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash.
Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint
assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the
opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how
everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.
It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream
some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me
then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having
learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd
rave about to someone.
In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not
even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read.
For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then
I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly,
the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective
view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is
not very common.
That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it
were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think
there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is
a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading
Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.
I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the
self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I
read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.
So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book
which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys
who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize
girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively
flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the
underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought
them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was
satisfied.
But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which
is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which
has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic,
even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out
[non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become
aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able
to read it?
I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when
I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or
blandly derived they were.
So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in
the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd
have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in
particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the
Philippines.
posted at 10:52 PDT (-0700)
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Technorati tagged as: book, review
So I spent the weekend with a crushing headache and difficulty breathing
without hydrotechnics, thus missing, among other events, the annual company
picnic.
But I wasn't completely inert as I could still perform the all important
actions of clicking and scrolling. All important if one wants to waste
time on the internets. Which I did!
So now I am a user of sonicliving and I even used the nifty import
from last.fm feature which was a snap. I also finally recruited a team at
Fantasy Congress.
Then I rated a bunch of movies at Netflix and diverged even more from
my friends.
posted at 08:59 PDT (-0700)
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The D&D 3.5 game I run on alternate Sunday afternoons has reached a milestone.
The party has traversed the first Region in the World's Largest Dungeon.
That's been, more or less, seven months of dungeon crawling to
get to this point. Two original characters remain from the original party,
both dwarves.
Now they're on to Region B, full of traps and goblinoids.
Perhaps now I can find time to fit in getting double duty out of the
book by running it for my co-workers, as well.
