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:
alsactl: set_control:894: warning: name mismatch (Music Playback
Volume/Synth Playback Volume) for control #7
alsactl: set_control:896: warning: index mismatch (0/0) for control #7
alsactl: set_control:898: failed to obtain info for control #7
(Operation not permitted)
So we lost saturday's webcast. Thank you, anonymous, incompetent
teenager.
[...]
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.
[...]
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2005/10.html#06
And, if you're asking "who is jwz, and why do I care?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
