Rotating One Monitor with Ubuntu

Ubuntu’s support for graphical displays has come a really long way. In Hardy 8.04, most of the configuration is handled through a GUI that works very well, in my experience. There are still a few edge cases that require a little manual configuration, though. Today I ran into one of them.

I have two monitors at work, and today I decided to rotate one of them to a vertical orientation. It’s nice for coding, because I can see many more lines of code at once. The other one I like to keep widescreen. Here’s how to accomplish this using an Nvidia dual-headed card, the nvidia proprietary driver (not nv), and two Dell flatscreen monitors.

Assuming you already have your monitors set up and working with the nvidia driver, start by backing up your xorg.conf. If something goes wrong, you can always restore this and be back where you started.

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf etc/X11/xorg.conf.bck

Then, fire up nvidia-settings from the terminal. Under “X Server Display Configuration”, make sure that you’re using “Separate X screen” and not “Twinview”. Twinview works great when the monitors are in the same orientation, and even gives slightly better performance, but didn’t allow me to rotate just one of the monitors. Check the box that says “Enable Xinerama”, and then write the changes to your X Configuration file.

Now, for the rotation:

sudo emacs /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In the appropriate “Monitor” section, add the lines:

Option "RandRRotation" "on"
Option "Rotate" "CCW"

Change “CCW” to “CW” for clockwise, instead of counter-clockwise.

Save the file, hit CTRL-ALT-Backspace to restart your Xserver, and you should be seeing the results. Great! Well, almost great…

There’s just one problem. There’s a known bug where gnome-terminal doesn’t work properly when nvidia composite drivers are enabled. The first solution in that thread (disabling the composite) didn’t work for me, so I did the following workaround that sets some environment variables every time the terminal is launched. Hit ALT-F2 and type “xterm” (since we can’t use gnome-terminal), then do the following:

sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-terminal /usr/bin/gnome-terminal2
sudo emacs /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

In the new file you’re now editing, paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 gnome-terminal2 $@

Save the file and make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

Now, everything should work correctly.

QOTD

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco until Tuesday night at a conference. I’m staying right on the bay, so I ducked outside tonight for some fresh air and to take a few pictures. After spending 6.5 hours on a plane to get here, and then the next 4 in meetings, I needed to stretch my legs. For those of you who worry that the government isn’t spending your tax dollars wisely, know that I had to stop over in Phoenix because the direct flights were too expensive for the NCI. The experience has also convinced me that if I ever take a trans-atlantic flight, I should just load up on Ny-Quil before takeoff. I get a little stir crazy after about 2 hours.

The flight in is very picturesque. After hours of dull brown wasteland, the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas shoot up out of the desert, then give way to the lush green California Valley. The landing at SFO is interesting as well, because the approach is over the bay. Out the window, the water rises closer and closer, until you’re convinced that you’re about to splash down, but at the last possible second the runway appears to meet the wheels of the plane.

Sadly, there won’t be time for much tourism because I’ll be cooped up discussing integrative analysis of cancer biology. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be here and expect to learn a lot, but I’m definitely wishing I could explore the kick-ass city right outside the hotel doors. Looks like I’ll have to come back with Heather one of these days. From the little bit I’ve seen, it looks awesome.

National Day of Prayer

I try to repost this every year on this date:

In 1952, Congress passed a law establishing the National Day of Prayer as an annual religious observance.

Quick: give me another sentence that uses the words “Congress,” “law,” “establish” and “religion.”

Hint (it’s under Amendment I)

Cognitive surplus

Clay Shirky thinks we’re at a critical point in our society, where we shift away from a passive television culture and use the cognitive surplus to create a participatory culture. Here’s an excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

Shirky estimates that if you took all of Wikipedia as a unit of measure — that is, all 2,354,625 articles, with their billions of edits, behind the scenes discussions, and individual contributors — the US’s two hundred billion hours per year of television watching could produce the equivalent of 2,000 wikipedias. That’s a lot of untapped mental activity. He argues, pretty convincingly, that if you could harness even 1% of that time in participatory ways, you’d come up with some pretty amazing stuff. Wikipedia, Youtube, and the rest of the blogosphere agree.

While My Youtube Gently Weeps

Today’s Youtube find: two fantastic covers of George Harrison’s ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’. The first is by Jake Shimabukuro, on ukelele:

The second is by Tom Petty, Prince, and company. Don’t miss Prince’s lengthy solo towards the end.

Historically Challenged Protest

I hate to break it to you, but . . .

Economic Stimulus

Dave Barry explains tax rebates:

Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.

Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.

Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.

Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q. But isn’t that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up.

This country is trillions of dollars in debt, and we’re handing out money like it’s growing on trees. Way to be fiscally responsible, politicians.

Even Puppets hate Expelled

Ride wit’ me

The DOT should bring these back.

Programming Note

The root of this site (chrisamiller.com) now contains an aggregator for lots of my different web activity, including posts from this blog, updates from twitter, del.icio.us quick links, and my pictures from flickr. There’s also a combined RSS feed, for your stalking convenience.

The style needs some work, but it’s nice to have everything together one one page.

A Message to Pennsylvanians from Bill Clinton

Hope, Change, and Obama ‘08

via Matt Haughey

Pre-meds suck

Five reasons to dislike pre-med students. I knew a few who didn’t fit this mold, but a large percentage were exactly this kind of asshole. The major crime, in my opinion, is number one on the article’s list:

They are not motivated by curiosity.
If they ask a question in class, it’s often to find out what will be on an upcoming exam. Some of them volunteer to work in a lab on real research projects, but they don’t give it their all because they have no passion for scientific inquiry — it’s just another line on their résumés.

The biology and chemistry majors in my classes hated many of the pre-meds for exactly this reason.

Picture this: A professor is in front of the class, weaving an elegant story about complex processes working in perfect harmony to sustain homeostasis. She’s just getting to the most fascinating part, and a pre-med’s hand shoots up: “Will we need to know this for the next quiz?”

At this point, the other pre-meds nod in unison, while the science majors do their best to prove that negative thoughts can cause someone to spontaneously combust.

Some of the commentors on that article miss the point completely:

But as to us not caring or being uninterested in learning, I think that is completely false. We may not be interested in learning biochemistry or microbiology because these are courses we are forced to take but will not be needed by most future doctors. We do care about relevant courses that we take in medical school, but any “pre-med” course taken in undergrad is completely useless in our future careers. Would the average biochemistry major be interested in Gross Anatomy if they were forced to take it?

Where do I start…

First of all, if you think that doctors don’t need to know microbiology or biochemistry, I hope that I never end up in your clinic. If you can’t understand pathogenic organisms or the way in which pharmaceuticals affect the body, there’s no way I’m putting my life in your hands.

Secondly, yes, many biochem majors would be interested in gross anatomy. As a biology major, I tried to get into anatomy in college, because I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about how the body works at a deeper level. (The pre-meds were taking up all the open slots, though). A true education demands more than just vocational training. I know this is shocking, but being interested in learning means that you enjoy hearing about things that have nothing to do with your job. I’m a better person today because I dabbled in art, and learned more about world history. Knowing gross anatomy wouldn’t have directly helped my career, but it would have been fascinating.

To the few pre-meds I knew who bucked the stereotype, I’m sincerely sorry. After all, I was able to escape these dipshits after leaving college. You had to spend 4 more years in med school with them.

Religion in the US

The good news is, atheists aren’t the most despised group in America anymore. The bad news is, only Scientologists beat them.

via Nisbet

Catchy song, clever video.

Going up?

For those of us who work in tall buildings, riding in an elevator is boringly routine. We step on, push the button, space out, and then exit when we reach our floor. Occasionally, someone travels only one floor, and we make fun of them after they’re gone (”Guess the stairs are broken again”).

Billions of elevator trips are made every day without incident, but every once in a while, something goes horribly wrong. In 1999, Nicholas White stepped onto an elevator after a smoke break, and ended up spending 41 hours trapped between floors.. You can see his descent into madness via the security cam footage here.

Even more frightening is this 2003 story from Houston, where Hitoshi Nikaidoh got trapped in the doors of a departing elevator and was decapitated. His body plummeted to the bottom of the shaft and the woman in the elevator spent nearly an hour trapped inside with a lifeless head. Thankfully, these events are very rare. Only about 26 people per year die in elevator accidents, and most of these are technicians. To put it in perspective, the same number of people die every 5 hours in automobile accidents.

The New Yorker article about White also explores the unseen side of the elevator industry and examines some of the cultural quirks that surround our daily trips from floor to floor:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator.

I know that I find myself subconsciously annoyed when someone doesn’t follow these norms. I also find the cultural differences interesting. In East Asian societies, people are much more likely to shoehorn into elevators, then spill out in clown-car fashion. I wonder whether this is a result of overcrowding in Chinese and Japanese cities, and whether our expanded definition of personal space is due to the relative underpopulation of most of the US.

Anyway, the article is lengthy but well-written and fascinating - check it out when you’ve got some time to kill.

Links via dmd’s post on MetaFilter

Elite

e·lite (noun) - representing the most choice or select; best

Doesn’t elite mean good? Is that not something we’re looking for in a president anymore? . . . Not only do I want an elite president, but I want somebody who is embarrassingly superior to me.

Why is the only sensible political commentary these days on Comedy Central?

This is the best we can do?

It’s hard to pick just one quote from this piece on TV pundits, politics, and orange juice:

There is no spin possible that turns “asking for orange juice” into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.

. . .

It is difficult, after all, to do anything but just plain laugh at the political “experts” shoved in front of us, experts so incompetent and up their own esteemed asses, at this point, that they really can’t report on anything more substantial than orange juice stories. They can’t do it — it is not a matter of secret bias, they are just not capable. The top “pundits” of cable television weren’t hired for their smarts on the hard issues, they were hired to make ridiculous, off-the-cuff pronouncements on the petty trivialities of the day. They know no more about the concerns of small town Americans than they know about roping cattle or performing a colonoscopy, and yet they will sit on television, in suits costing more than some of the used cars the rest of us drive, and claim expertise on all three.

Read the whole damn thing, and then demand better.

Only the inhaling from one hour of NPR’s Morning Edition (mp3)

Only the Obscenities from NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (mp3). (the full album gets this treatment here)

There are lots more obsessive-compulsive collections like this over at Waxy

Blog 2.0

Actually, it’s probably the 3rd or 4th major revamping of this site. Visually, this upgrade is a little more subtle, but behind the scenes there have have been some major overhauls. A few of the notable differences:

Content Engine: The biggest change is that I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress. Honestly, both have all the functionality I need, but my webhost (1and1) sets very low timeouts on scripts, which means that MT’s rebuilding process often died while trying to crunch it’s way through the archives of the site. I hear that the next generation of MT will be sleeker and faster, but I got tired of waiting. Wordpress seems to be working well so far, and the migration wasn’t too difficult.

Visual Upgrades: You’ll probably notice the wider margins, along with some minor (and ongoing) tweaks to the style of the site. If time permits, I’m going to overhaul the layout even more, but I’ll leave it here for tonight. There are a ton of web designers whose work influences my ideas, notably Kottke, Matt Haughey, and the old stylings of SimpleBits. Unfortunately, I never seem to have the time to put most of those ideas in place. C’est la vie.

Twitter Integration: I’ve started using Twitter to do microblogging, and those posts will be appearing here on the site (probably in a daily-digest form). It’s a nice way to shoot off quick one-liners as I think of things throughout the day. I’m using Twitter Tools, with a few PHP hacks that I threw in to make it work the way I wanted.

Please let me know if you find anything broken (chris at ‘this domain’). More technical stuff under the fold.

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