Freedom Dreams

I haven’t posted for a while, mainly due to using my podcast, Freedom Socks, as a means of expression, and I’m afraid that today you’ve got a fed up rant.

Firstly, i think I managed to cause my pc to power off by having a plasma ball too close. I also managed to get a bit of interference on my podcast from it (when I say a bit, I mean *very* loud, bit we didn’t have it switched on for long), on top of the fuzzy sound from my on board sound card.

Then, I decided to try using networking scripts intsead of network manager, so that it wouldn’t wouldn’t drop the wireless connection when I plugged an ethernet cable in, and then not being able to reconnect (I’m not sure why).

So, whilst I was messing around with the networking scripts, I plugged an old hard drive in to look at one I had on there. Unfortunately, this meant opening up the side of my pc, and whilst doing this, I knocked my brocken SATA cable connector out of the electrical tape that was holding it in place, and thus lost my primary hard drive.

The cable connector has to be in just the right place for the contacts to touch, so I could not get it to work again, no matter how much tape I used, without holding it in place myself. After much frustrastion, I realised that I could achieve a temporary soltion by plugging the cable in the other way around.

All this messing with with the hard drive caused a bit of corruption. Firstly, there a lot of fscking when I finally booted my system back up. Secondly, some of the files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ are now corrupted, some containing weird SATA errors. This means that I couldn’t use the package manager. I managed to lessen this issue by removing corrupted files, and reinstalling some packages, however, I still get warnings all over the place.

Also, these are not the only files that are corrupted. I have got a few suspicous errors from other programs (mplayer and gconf). In fact, mplayer refused to play video due to one of them, so I might have quite a problem and end up having to abadon this install (of debian). I could just switch back to gnewsense partition, but jokosher did not seem to work very well with that…. don’t get me started on jokosher.

And the reason I started all this messing that got me into this trouble? To have a go with some more pxe booting on that brocken laptop.. I’ve actually ended up doing nothing with it.

Im typing this in dvorak, which is still slower than my qwerty was. I haven’t done much deliberate work on it since becoming able to touch type though. I also now fail at qwerty. I was hoping to be able to do both well, but it isn’t looking promosing at the moment.

So, yeah, I’m a bit fed up.

So, I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I’m writing this post in it….. vvveeeerrrryyyy slowly. I’ve just about got to the point where I can use Dvorak to chat on IRC, but I still have a deep sypathy for those who can’t touch type.

I am trying Dvorak just for the fun of it - its supposed to be better than qwerty, anh although I think that its probably true, I don’t see any benefits yet due to the steep learning curve… I guess thats how many people feel about Linux or free software in general. Fear of change is not completely irrational… effort is required to make that change. All we can try to do is reduce the work involved as much as possible; but more importantly, wemust make it evident to people that their effort will be worthwhile.

I would write a bit more, but it is painstakingly slow…..

In ether news, the third episode of Freedom Socks, my free software podcast, has been released. Have a listen and please tell me what you think.