Honestly, I can't stand it. Maybe it's because I don't like it when the doorbell rings. The doorbell is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me; I can't stand hearing it. The phone can be the same way sometimes. Like now, when I'm working and trying to concentrate and just want nothing but to be left alone in silence.
Maybe it's the repetitiveness of it. The doorbell rings, the dog barks/growls for like 5 minutes. It's all quiet until the bell rings and then there's this loud barking and running and howling -- for NO REASON AT ALL. She doesn't need to bark. But there no way to tell her that. Then it rings again, as if one annoyance won't make you interrupt what you're doing, but two or more will. Worse even still is when they let the kids ring the doorbell. They ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it. It's bothering you and it just... won't... stop. It brings out a primal "hit it until it goes away" feeling in me. I hardly ever shout and I'm extremely nice to my dog, except when the the doorbell rings.
Having said all that, I can say I'm nowhere near as bad as this guy. That's just not right. It's one thing to dislike the doorbell, but another thing to perforate your front door and injure people.
Maybe it's my general dislike for strangers. I can't imagine a type of person worse than those who actually walk up to people's doors and try to sell them things. The ones that try to foist pamphelets and shit on you in the mall are pretty bad, but at least you can escape them at home. People coming to your door on Halloween is like people selling you stuff, except trick-or-treaters bother you because they want stuff from you. Bottom line: if you don't know me, then leave me alone -- don't call, don't come over, don't bother me. Even on Halloween. Especially on Halloween.
I'd like Halloween much better if I could just leave a bucket of candy outside with a note saying "Take a couple, just leave me the hell alone."
Anyway, I turned out all the lights downstairs, and locked the door. I think they can hear me yelling at the dog to shut up, though...
I was looking at the load on a couple machines at work today. I did it by looking at /proc/loadavg. For those wondering, that's a special file on Linux systems which has information in it about how busy the machine is. You can access it programmatically, by hand, or with whatever and see the load average. Its contents look like this:
[wee@lazlo wee]$ cat /proc/loadavg
0.47 0.16 0.05 2/118 5661
The first three numbers are measures of CPU utilization for the last 1, 5, and 10 minute periods (these are what you see when you run uptime or w). The last two sets of numbers mean... I don't know what they mean. I never really had to look at them before. So I got curious, looked around the web for a bit and finally found out what they mean.
Turns out that the fourth set shows the number of currently running processes as a fraction of the total number of processes. The last set shows the last process ID used.
That's pretty much it, really.
With all this talk of snipers, I thought it might be nice to know more about military bullet wound patterns and just how a .223 compares to a .308.
BTW, I think my dog would look mighty fetching sporting one of these.
I came across yet another software package that makes me happy every time I see it. It's extremely cool, and kinda clever. It's one of those mostly trivial applications that I never knew existed but always wanted. I had gotten along pretty well without it so far, but I didn't know how much I'd like to use it.
The item in question isn't an application, per se, but an API. And stuff. It's called XOSD. It stands for X On Screen Display. It mimics the sort of text that your DVD player or VCR might momentarily display on your TV. They have an XMMS plugin as well, so when you're listening to music, reducing the volume, skipping a song, whatever, it displays that VCR-like text in some part of your root window.
I've been running gkrellm with the XMMS plugin such that gkrellm minimizes XMMS and the controls are right there on the krell. And now I've got the XOSD bits working and it's all pretty seamless. I don't have an active XMMS window, but I see the XOSD stuff telling me what's playing. I chuckle every time a song changes.
More Linux stuff again. This time it's mini guide on getting two monitors to work with X. My new Dell at work has two outputs (RGB and DVI), and I have two flat panels right next to each other (since I have two PCs right next to each other) and each has dual inputs. So I was thinking that it'd be nice if I nabbed another video card for my one PC and then got dual head working on the DVI-capable one. Then I'd have two dual head PCs, each sharing two monitors.
I came across a nice article on Linux Journal's web site about little-used shell commands. I had never known about 'tac', which basically does what 'cat' does only backwards. (One good example was using 'tail -3 /etc/passwd | tac' to find the newest three user accounts on the system.)
There are more good ones there, and no point in repeating them here. It's worth a read.
A while back, I wrote two entries which went against the intended purpose of this web site. The posts were honest opinions of certain events surrounding my tenure at a previous employer, and were also perhaps a not-so-flattering (but nonetheless truthful) take on some of the people who worked there. I have removed these posts and will not restore them (indeed, the actual content has been deleted, and I have no copies or archives). I did not censor myself, nor did I remove them at the request of anyone involved. On the contrary, I've been asked by several people (some of whom were tangentially involved with the now unmentioned events) to put them back. I won't do this. As I've said, the posts did not fit the purpose of this site and writing them in the first place was a mistake. That I'm writing this entry at all is evidence of that. Let me explain why I feel this is so.
This site was originally intended to be a place where I could write things down, get thoughts out, save geek stuff, annotate what would otherwise be bookmarks, sort ideas, try new things, and rant and rave in whatever direction my fairly off-kilter mind took me. It was also originally intended for "internal" use, and was in fact originally "installed" on an internal, non-public server. After a while, I had some people say that they wouldn't mind having access to the stuff that I had written. My wife and I decided, almost on a lark, to register this domain and start putting things on it.
The "site" was repurposed into something more public; anyone who happened upon it was free to look at whatever they wanted. It grew over time and people came to know about it but we never advertised or promoted this site. In fact I've never even linked to it from anywhere (there are no links back to here from my "primary" domain 27.org, for instance). I don't even think my family knows about it (one of my brothers might; I'm not sure). Most of the people I know have no idea it exists, actually. It's not that I don't want anyone to know about it, it's just that there really isn't any good reason for telling them; I don't think they'd care all that much. I suppose I'm just apathetic in the matter, or maybe I'm not conceited enough to think they'd want to read anything I've written. What I'm saying is that anything here is for me and me alone. I have no other intended audience.
At the risk of repeating myself once again, the common thread running through the idea and motive behind this site is that it is ultimately for me and nobody else. This is a key concept.
As you can guess from looking at the search terms list to the right, I have a habit of looking through the web server logs with various automatic processes. Forewarned is forearmed, even from a non-security standpoint, and looking through logs is good practice to get into. So when I happened to find out that there were more than a couple visitors from my former employer, I decided to take a closer look at what was going on. Turns out that just before those visits, unknown person(s) from a certain distinct area of the U.S. had found my posts while searching for the names of my former co-workers. Instantly, those posts I made were for someone else, and being used by someone else. This was bad -- and more than a little upsetting. I felt like a powerless and unwitting accomplice to whatever their actions happened to be, and had no idea what damage others were doing using what I wrote. My thoughts were being used without my will against other people, in a battle in which I not only could not stay out of but couldn't even choose which side to be on (assuming I even wanted to be involved at all). This was a startling experience and something of a wakeup call for me to re-examine what I am doing here. I don't have an editorial "mission", not in the slightest, but clearly something was amiss.
I wrote what I wrote because I had strong feelings about the subject. At the time I wrote those posts, I had just been reminded of extremely distasteful events which I'd tried, mostly successfully up to that point, to forget about. So as a cathartic of sorts, I wrote about those events. I wrote the truth, as far as I knew it, along with my opinions and how I felt. Those who are familiar with the events generally agree with my interpretations. I still hold those opinions. If asked, I'll volunteer them and give the same recollection of what happened and why. I won't do it online, however.
I have rarely written about work. I rarely write about friends or family. I don't write about me all that much. I don't even swear in my posts (those of you that know me will recognize the contrast between the online and the conversational). Now you know why. I don't want to have to second-guess myself, or worry about what someone else might think if I happen to mention them. It's hard enough for me to not be uncouth and stubborn and asocial and indiscreet and sarcastic in person without immortalizing people in what someone might see as harsh online words. I really have no urge to harm or offend anyone, and if you ask anyone who knows me, they'll likely say I'm the most helpful person they know -- helpful to a fault, probably. When I wrote those posts, I was in a bad spot, mentally. I forgot what it is I do here. My posts didn't reflect who I am or what I'm about as much as they didn't reflect what this site is about; they did both a disservice. So they had to go.
Call it caving to internal pressure, but after thinking about it for a while, I feel that there's enough ill will in this world without actively creating more.
And that is all I'm going to say about the subject.
If you need to get a leg up on CSS, I found a site which lets you try stuff out pretty easily. Worth a look.
Someone needs to tell America's "religious leaders" (Falwell, Graham, et al.) to shut the hell up. They're embarassing those of us in this country who can actually think rationally, and they are giving this country a bad name.
Just can it already. You're making things worse.
I had an odd task at work today. I had to set up one of our web servers to handle normal http traffic (ie, respond on port 80), but take all those requests and shuffle them to the same server's SSL virtual host. Basically, I had to make all "normal" web requests use SSL. It seemed like a fairly straightforward thing to do, but it wasn't really.
At first, I simply tried to use a Redirect directive in the docroot container like so:
Redirect / https://example.com/
But that won't work. Seems like it should, but it won't. You're saying "go here instead" and when you get there, you need to go back, which makes you go forward again. It's a big endless cycle. What does work is using mod_rewrite. Works very very well, in fact. You do like so in httpd.conf:
# mod_rewrite Section
RewriteEngine on
RewriteLog /var/log/httpd/https_rewrite_log
RewriteLogLevel 1
# If they try to access http, redirect to https
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ? ? ? ? ? !^443$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [L,R]
You also need to add the following to every virtual host that you have:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions inherit
And somewhere at the top of the conf file, change/add the UseCanonicalName to "Off". Now all requests for anything in http://example.com/ will be requests for https://example.com/.
I've already written far too much about Clippy (that annoying, banal paperclip thing from MS Office). It turned up on Slashdot again tonight, in a poll this time. I came across a couple things I had to share.
The first is Vigor. This is probably the coolest app I've seen for Unix in a long, long time. I love this sort of thing. Probably the next spiffiest thing in this category would be Moaning Goat Meter, or maybe even Amusing Misuse of Resources. I'm going to start running Vigor instead of normal vi now I think.
I also happened upon an image of clippy helping President Bush which just about perfectly encapsulates what I imagine a real clippy would need to say in order to be helpful to our poor President.
I got tired of always including target="_blank" when making links in my posts here in Moveable Type. So I went searching for a way to make this happen automatically. (This was one of the reaasons I wanted to get away from Newspro, in fact). I searched through the support forums on moveabletype.org but only found one tip that seemed to do what I wanted.
You basically add a line that says
If you're in need of this sort of thing as well, I have a fix (of sorts). It's kind of a drastic one, too. But first, the fix. On or about line 515 of $MTDIR/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm (in the '_hdlr_entry_body' subroutine), add this line:
$text =~ s/<\s*A\s+HREF\s*=\s*(["'])(.*?)\1\s*>//gi;
That will turn every anchor tag into one which opens in a new window. As I said, it has drawbacks:
You can get around #2 by using a conditional with a regex test. You could also use another regex right before it to strip any existing target=... stuff, then re-apply the target="_blank" Not terribly elegant, though. But since I only have ~100 entries and two authors (who both want the same thing) on my web site, and it's kinda late, the solution works for me.
I'll likely wind up investigating a more permanent/graceful way to get his done but this works for now...
A while back, I wrote about how to customize Opera to use a dictionary.com shortcut. Well, today I was searching for some MySQL stuff and I swear every result was for a French page. I realized that when this happens I usually search for stuff and then go to Goggle's "Advanced Search" page and click English and 100 results and search again. Then I realized that I had customized Opera once, so why not do it some more?
In your $HOME/.opera/search.ini file, search for the string Name=&Google. It should be right at the top. Change the URL=... line to this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s#=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&lr=lang_en&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&sourceid=opera
When you restart Opera, you should be able to it F8+g, enter a search term and then wind up with 100 results per page and every search result linked to an English language page.
I happened upon a Slashdot submission recently that smacked of advertising. The gent who submitted the story said:
K-Man asks: "A while ago, I spent a few months at a dying web startup, and, as I looked at the costs of running such an operation, I realized that a tremendous synergy could be achieved by consolidating multiple dying web startups into one umbrella organization. Many functions - bankruptcy filing, creditor evasion, even hiring contractors for fictitious compensation - could be combined under one roof. While the "web incubator" was invented in the 90's, why has no one adopted a similar model for the 00's?"
He seemed like a guy who was trying to pitch an idea, and get something started in a not-so-subtle way. Slashdot has been essentially taking ads recently, so the post was not surprising. I could tell from his idea that he had never done anything technical or successful. I could tell that he mostly "created" things, or was "an enabler". He used the word "synergy" seriously. I'm postive that he's used the word "paradigm" in conversation and felt he was being earnest. Maybe he's a solutioneer? I have no idea. But his ideas are wooly thinking electronically personified. I felt as though I had to say something. And I thought my response was pretty good, and I thought other people might like to see it too. Here it is...
A while ago, I spent a few months at a dying web startup, and, as I looked at the costs of running such an operation, I realized that a tremendous synergy could be achieved by consolidating multiple dying web startups into one umbrella organization.
I've worked for two failed start-ups since 1994, both of which did things relating to the Internet and hosting. In that time, I've also worked for a Fortune 500 company and a state government. I've known many people who have worked for various organizations, failed or otherwise. I've seen quite a range of workplaces. Your idea will not work.
First off, you assume safety in numbers. This is not the case. If you were CEO of a struggling dotcom, barely keeping afloat, would you like a pets.com to merge with you? A company that tries to make a profit shipping products which have margins so slim that double bagging erases profit? Would that help you or hurt you? There is no economy of scale in failed ideas.
Secondly, I've seen and had to deal with what happens when you try to bring different companies' technologies together under one roof. You want to set something up where everyone can use the same database servers, right? One company uses Windows 2000, one uses NT, one uses HP-UX, one uses Linux. You want them to use to the same web server? One uses IIS, one uses Websphere, one Apache, and so on and so on. You would need to have technical staff able to setup and administer these one-offs. In fact, you'd have a whole company with one-offs. Everything would be an emergency (I've seen this in action; it's not pretty), everything would be custom fit, nothing can be re-used. There's a reason Henry Ford became rich by employing standardized parts on an assembly line and his competitors who built each unit from scratch, by hand, have been completely forgotten. You might be able to get away with using the same physical Net connection(s) and rack hardware/floorspace, but that is about it.
The third reason why your idea won't work involves personalities. When a company starts dying, people leave (and get laid off) in pretty well defined stages. I can't quantify those stages, but I can say they exist as fact since I've seen and experienced them first- and second-hand many times.
The first to leave are the flighty ones that are always looking for greener pastures even in good times. These people never drank your koolaid and felt little loyalty. You were a paycheck and they'd have likely left even if your comapny hadn't tanked. The second group to leave are ones that would like to stick it out, but since they have families and such, they feel the need to protect their personal future. "No hard feelings, but I can't take IOUs two pay periods in a row..." Good, solid workers who make up the bulk of the company (and will might even remember it fondly). The third group to leave are those who thought they'd get rich off the company, or move up in the company once it got real big. These are the ones that take loans against their homes and advances on their credit cards for the company's sake. They bought into the company's dream, and had impressive titles to match their impressive hopes. The 25 year-old CTOs and VPs you heard a lot about a couple years back were in this group (but were not the sole members by any means).
Who does that leave? Founders, initial investors, and those that came in very early (and probably worked very hard early on). This is upper management, usually, and might even include one or two technical people. By and large, however, these are the folks who have made business plans and sold investors on ideas by using fanciful, meaningless graphs printed on glossy paper, not technical merits. They knew enough buzzwords to get them in the door, or fake technical acumen. They have insane amounts of stock options, and were all hoping to cash in. Depending on their proclivities they will either do anything to save "The Company" (moral, ethical or otherwise) or they will try to make things right by cutting a few corners or trying new things (moral, ethical or otherwise). These are the ones that wanted to get rich off the backs of others. It was their turn to make it big, and their "Vision" which was to succeed and make them rich and powerful. Their baby was going to grow up into Something Big.
Their baby has genetic defects, however, and is dying slowly of a wasting disease. This makes them angry, bitter, spiteful parents. They wanted their baby to be in the World Series, or win a Nobel Prize, but instead they get to watch it take the little bus to school all its short life. They gave birth to the runt of the litter. Their simple-minded and feeble offspring cannot survive on its own. It's not fair. They turn evil. It was not their idea that failed. It was not their mis-management that failed. It was 9/11, or market conditions, or a competitor's dirty tricks, or that one supplier who wouldn't extend them just a little more credit which they needed in order to "take it to the next level". It was something or someone else which failed, not them. Not their ideas or their personalities or the mishandling of the company, no.
These are the last people around when a company dies. They are not nice or happy people. They don't have good personality traits in the best of times and at the worst or times can turn on those around them like a rabid Rottweiler. These are people who will backstab and then fire their own family members if it means even getting one more chance at a small round of funding (I've personally seen this happen -- twice).
So your idea is that these people all get together, with the goals of making their ideas work by becoming a unit. By combining their strengths, they can overcome the redundancies that killed their businesses. They can all get together and learn from each other's mistakes. They can not repeat history together, and avoid the pitfalls others have encountered. Is that about right? It will never work.
There will be several people who feel they should run the show, decide direction, forge new alliances, etc. There will be several people who steal the ideas of other members of the co-op and use them to try to get rich. There will be people who see the successes of another unit and decide to move into their territory. There will be people who try to headhunt from within other units. There will be people who use the whole co-op to claim their unit is larger than it really is, or that it does more than it really does. Once one unit gets a taste of success, it'll do everything it can to shrug off the other members. There will be those who will lie, cheat and steal to get ahead. Business is, after all, business.
You may say that I have a cyincal view of the world, and I might indeed, but what I say is true. Ask someone who has been in a commune what they think of altruistic ideals. You'll find that nearly all of them discovered that the only person who really thought the commune was a good idea what the leader/founder of the commune. I know what you propose is completely different from a commune, but the point remains that there will always be people who seek to gain at the expense of others no matter what it takes. Getting these types together will not help any of them (or you), collectively or separately.
I don't know why, but I've always wondered what that boilerplate, "dummy" text you sometimes see on things which have a temporary layout was all about. Well, turns out that it has a name even. It's called Lorem Ipsum, and its a jumbled version of Cicero's de Finibus 1.10.32.
Here's a somewhat lengthy version I found:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.
Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, At accusam aliquyam diam diam dolore dolores duo eirmod eos erat, et nonumy sed tempor et et invidunt justo labore Stet clita ea et gubergren, kasd magna no rebum. sanctus sea sed takimata ut vero voluptua. est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat.
Consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
plok. Su havo loasor cakso tgu pwuructs tyu.
I'm about half sick of Nimda and CodeRed. I get thousands of requests a month for both. It's annoying the hell out of me. I added these to my httpd.conf file:
Redirect /scripts http://www.microsoft.com Redirect /MSADC http://www.microsoft.com Redirect /c http://www.microsoft.com Redirect /d http://www.microsoft.com Redirect /_mem_bin http://microsoft.com Redirect /msadc http://microsoft.com RedirectMatch (.*)\cmd.exe$ http://microsoft.com$1
It seems to keep out the riffraff.
If you get a machine that really really wants into your system (I have a couple that won't leave me alone), then this might be an option for you:
mount -t smbfs password= //xx.xx.xx.xx/C$ /mnt/luser
vi /mnt/luser/boot.ini
Change the "BootDelay=" to "BootDelay=99999" and the boot message to "Run a virus scanner, asshole".
umount /mnt/dork
Note that I don't condone this sort of activity personally, but only mention it for educational purposes.
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc alias eth0 tulip alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx alias sound-slot-0 cmpci post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || : pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || : alias sound-slot-1 emu10k1 post-install sound-slot-1 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || : pre-remove sound-slot-1 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || : alias usb-controller usb-uhcIt should look like this:
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc alias eth0 tulip alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx alias sound-slot-0 emu10k1 post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || : pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || : alias usb-controller usb-uhciJust get rid of all the 'sound-slot-0' stuff and make the Soundblaster-centric stuff sound-slot-0 and you're back in business.