I got one of this delightfully cheap-ass lappies for Christmas and installed Kubuntu on it. Unfortunately, sound has always been a sore spot — my primary use for the lappy is on the train, so I need to use headphones and be able to mute the main speakers. While many folks figured out how to get sound working, none of the solutions seemed to be able to get the headphone jack going correctly.

So today, since ALSA 1.0.16 is officially out, I decided to upgrade and see what happened. Lo and behold, *everything* is working. I can:

• Play sound through the Front speakers
• Play sound through the headphones
• Mute/unmute either front speakers or headphones
• Record audio through the built-in mic
• Play the captured audio

Not only that, but the auto-configuration stuff seems to be the best way to configure this. So if you install the latest ALSA and try this, make sure you remove any  “model=” options from your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.

My guess is that any lappy with the Intel HDA hardware ( rev 03 ) and ALC262 codec will probably work like this. So enjoy, and thanks to the ALSA devs for getting this stuff figured out.

I was totally on board with the SixDegrees craze back in the day. And then Friendster. And then MySpace, which I tried and was bored with by 2005.

And then MySpace got a huge surge of popularity, and people created millions of profile pages with all sorts of snarky commentary and bulletin-board posts. They hacked their profile pages with backgrounds and (mostly annoying) music.

I admit, I went back and updated my profile, wondering if I’d meet any new or interesting people. And then I got bored.

Apparently, I’m not alone. 

But why? These communities have millions of members, nearly every kind of interest under the sun, and have  even spawned TV shows like Project: MyWorld where three unknown girls go and meet people they know from MySpace all over the world. Obviously there’s a lot going on, so why would people back off from all of this?

Here’s the thing: on MySpace, the point is to drive traffic to your profile. As a band, there’s a benefit there: you want exposure. As a Regular Joe, you just want to keep in touch with your friends. Sure, you may find some friends you haven’t seen in a long time, but once you’ve done that it’s far simpler to just email and IM each other, and on those venues you don’t have to wait for some crappy profile page to load, get bombarded with useless ads, and deal with friend requests from God-knows-who.

So. Me? You’ll find me at the same place you’ve found me for years: my email and IM addresses. See ya there, it’s the new-new-NEW thing.

It’s been about 6 weeks since my last post. Rather than grovel at the feet of the Internet and claim how busy I was ( shit, man, we’re all busy and if we aren’t then we wouldn’t have anything to write about ), I’m posting this brief note apologizing for not doing my civic duty and writing about whatever I was doing.

I’d fill you in on what happened but it all went by so fast I only remember certain bits. In the words of Inigo Montoya: “Let me ’splain — no, no time — let me sum up.”

• Had Christmas. Tried to merge our families. Moderate success: it sucked less than Thanksgiving.
• Am getting underlings at work. (if you are a C++ developer who wants a gig, send me a resume)
• Have taken on all the work the underlings are supposed to do when they get hired. Seriously, send me a fucking resume, I’m awesome to work for.
• Ben started violin lessons. Now I know how much of a pain in the ass it was for my parents when I took violin. He’s working hard though, and some of the notes actually really sound like notes now. Cool.
• Got an air hockey table. The Dwink Invitational Tournament is in the planning stages.
• Got a new laptop. Running 64bit Linux. Vista came on it, but I lost interest after about two hours.

I think that’s about it. I plan to jump back on the posting train now, but hey, I’ve said that before.