/dev/null productions

They are. And it’s amazing how often they happen at work. Time flows normally while the work comes in and is feathered nicely over the course of the day. Then at some point, the work breaks. Either it gets accomplished much too quickly and a day’s tasking becomes an hour’s blitz, or something is said and any motivation quickly dwindles.

In either case, these relativistic space-time distortions are far-fetching and disastrous. They suck co-workers in like black holes, absolutely refusing to let go no matter what comes its way. This is especially true during holiday weeks and early dismissals, as space-time collapses to a relativistic crawl.

These are the accounts of nightmares.

I’ve fulfilled the requirements of the Nanowrimo competition as of this past Sunday. Fifty-thousand words lie in wait for final verification, to prove themselves to the lords of the Nanowrimo that I have successfully joined their ranks.

But the story continues.

As I’ve enjoyed telling those that ask, I’m almost out of Mexico. There are really only two more acts that need fleshing, and after that comes whatever resolution the characters deem necessary. Elizabeth Wilde has seen more rapid development than I intended. My original purpose through the total arch of 52 assassinations was a slow degradation of her moral fabric. Now, post-arrest, she has grown far more ruthless than I originally intended.

I’m trying to avoid references to the Rivernator, but a couple scenes have definitely played out as such.

My goal is still to finish by November 30th, but I don’t see that happening. There’s just simply too much left to tell. Not that I won’t try, but I’m expecting at least another twenty thousand words before I can finally slap the almighty “The End”.

This has been a spectacular month of storytelling, though, and it’s affected more people around me than I originally thought. My wife is showing an honest interest in the story. My folks constantly ask if I’ve finished. So coworkers got involved and participated on their own (You guys rock). Jim even dived in, and I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with. I’m eager to see the fruits of this past month.

Around the time of Kubuntu 9.04, I was pretty annoyed. I’ve read plenty about how Kubuntu is pretty much the bastard child of KDE and Ubuntu and received very little love insofar as development time, effort, energy, etc. 9.04, I believed, showed this to an extreme. It was buggy, and a lot of these bugs showed up just in the process of ordinary use. These are just my own personal examples:

* Unstable OpenGL Desktop acceleration (I typically ran without effects 24/7)
* Poor Suspend-to-RAM recovery. 1 in 3 wake-ups would hard-lock the system
* Power Management daemon hardlocks system if plugged in during Suspend-to-RAM
* Crash-happy OpenOffice Writer
* KDM crashes

This is in addition to other minor bugs, such as libpam-mount being flaky and KNetworkManager being unreliable (I ended up using WICD, which was a godsend).

Thankfully, 9.10 redeemed Kubuntu for the year.

I switched over around Release Candidate 2, and even that proved more reliable than 9.04. Power management seems much tighter. I’ve had only 1 hardlock in many, many Suspend-to-RAM instances. I can plug the laptop in when it’s in sleep mode. The OpenOffice integration with KDE is nice, though it did decide to take a nosedive a few days ago; that has yet to repeat, however (**knocks on wood**).

KNetworkManager still pisses me off. The application seems to be married to KWallet, an app that I absolutely hate. If I turn off the wallet system, KNetworkManager is neutered. In addition, it did not auto-detect my wireless network’s encryption method… something I’ve come to expect these days. Easy to fix once I realized the problem, but still surprising.

I do believe they gimped WICD with this release… though I can’t prove it. That service does not seem to recover from Suspend-to-RAM. It loses all ability to scan for wireless networks and refuses to reconnect when the laptop comes back up. Maybe this is just my own personal experience, but I’ve put up with the KWallet pestering up until now (It only insists on the password once per login and doesn’t ask again coming out of sleep).

The option to automagically encrypt home directories was a beautiful addition, and pretty much nullified any need for that other article I posted a while back. Given this OS is on my writing laptop, I jumped all over this option. It may cause problems at reinstall time if I ever need to just upgrade the OS. I keep my /home root on a separate disk partition, so I can upgrade the OS without worrying about my preferences and files. This option stores everything in a /home/.usernamePrivate file and mounts the file at log-in time. I’m sure this will cause problems later on, but I can worry about that later.

I discovered the Globe desktop integration as part of this release. Maybe I’m just behind in the times, but this is a nice feature. Pretty eye candy, doesn’t require OpenGL acceleration, and any kind of dynamic desktop is a boost when showing off the operating system to the Windows babies at my office.

Overall, not a bad release thus far. I believe I’m pleased, and may not have to jump on the upgrade bandwagon come next April.