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DNA Sequencing

with your host
Jamie Zawinski
6-Oct-2005 (Thu)
Wherein I whine about computers.

Ok, just skip this entry if you don't care about my periodic bitching about computers.




So, the other day I made the mistake of running the software updater on the webcast machines. (FC4 yum.) I have a habit of doing this crazy thing, in the possibly-misguided hope that it will cause me to have the latest round of security fixes and prevent the script kiddies from running roughshod over my machines.

Yet, you may have noticed my use of the word "mistake", because this time it happened to update ALSA (which, laughably, stands for "Advanced" Linux Sound "Architecture".) Now what do you think often happens when ALSA gets updated? If you're guessing "something bad", well, you're right. In this case (and, I think, in every previous case) what it means is that they changed the names of all the parameters of my sound cards. This means something like, some teenager decided that where it said "EMU10K1" it should really have said "EMU10K1 PCM", or some shit like that. Why should I care about this? Well, I shouldn't. Except that this means that the previously-saved configuration file for my sound card NO LONGER WORKS because (I guess?) it has the old names in it. It spits out errors like the following, and doesn't make any music:

So we lost saturday's webcast. Thank you, anonymous, incompetent teenager.

To fix this, I had to run the confiuguration program that lets you "graphically" reconfigure the sound card. It runs in a terminal. (In another universe, you may know this as "DOS".) It is dead sexy and looks like this:

Aw yeah. So at this point, my task is to conduct an exhaustive search of all these fucking sliders and mute buttons to figure out what they do this time, and which one makes the sound come back on. There are sixty-five of them, and most of them have names that mean nothing to me.

When I do mindless sysadmin bullshit like this, I always write it down. This time, my notes didn't help much.

Last time what I wrote down was:

    alsamixer SigmaTel STAC9708,11:
      Master: 84
      Bass/Treble: 50
      PCM: 100
      Wave: 100
      Wave Capture: 100
      Capture: 33
      AC97 Capture: 100
      EMU10K1 PCM: 100

      Everything else 0/Mute.

This time, the answer is:

    alsamixer SigmaTel STAC9708,11:
      Master: 84
      Bass/Treble: 50
      PCM: 100
      Wave: 100
      Wave Capture: 100
      Line: 0 Rec Mute
      Capture: 33 Rec
      AC97 Capture: 100
      EMU10K1 PCM: 0/0 (the first, stereo one)
      EMU10K1 PCM: 100 (the second, mono one)

Did I leave something out when I wrote it down last time? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no", this shit just changed.

This is exactly the kind of time-wasting bullshit that caused me to give up on running Unix as my home desktop. I switched to MacOSX about four months ago, and I haven't regretted it for a second.

Why am I still running this halfassed teenager-ware called Linux on my servers, you might ask? Well, I believe that the sad thing is that (hardware support aside) I'd still have to run exactly the same halfassed teenager-ware on a Mac to make the webcasts work (e.g., Icecast); it would just all be even less reliable, because it'd be running on a platform that none of the developers use.

In other words, I'm just fuckin' doomed.

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