johnbarrytech.com

I’ve spent about 3 days now trying to get 3d acceleration working with my ATI 1600 graphics card on Ubuntu Hardy Heron LTS.
Nada, zip, zilch.
I’ve tried:

1. Enabling the drivers via System –> Administration –> Hardware Drivers
2. Manually installing the packages via apt-get install
3. Following the Hardy Heron ATI installation guide manual steps
4. Manually tweaking my Xorg.conf after all three methods above on the off chance that would work

But alas, nothing.
It appears as though it just plain doesn’t recognize the ATI card, but when I use the command lscpci it returns the right values… 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV530 [Radeon X1600]

Now the last thing it might be is the fact that it’s a dual input card, and I’m using the secondary input. Combine that with a troublesome monitor (Gateway FPD2185W) and it’s a recipe for disaster I guess.

Anyhow, I’m done with it for a while; this is supposed to be a development box, not a gaming rig.

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I’ve also been breaking my head against the wall with Ruby on Rails. Programming by coincidence again. . . but I’m not sure what I’d do differently at this point.
I don’t have a strong grasp on the syntax of either Ruby OR Rails, so I’m in a position where I’m taking examples strewn about the net, and patching them together with my own crazy-town requirements.
Scaffolding, while very powerful, was/is quite counterintuitive to me. It’s difficult to grasp the idea that a class’s get methods are wrapped up in calls I can’t seem to find.

What I’m trying to do is relatively simple – maintain/display a list of stand-up comedians in the Chicago area, and the expats/deceased. My table structure’s basic – firstname, lastname, URL, status. I chose to make the status an int for extensibility reasons; if I used a boolean it was guaranteed a requirement would appear for separating expats and deceased. . . with an int I can extend if it’s needed.

Here’s the crappy PHP version I’d cobbled together months ago: Comedian Listing
There’s a variety of weaknesses with it – for starters:

• the whole tiki-wiki platform’s too ambitious. There’s too much there for anyone but a developer to love, and comedians are not developers.
• Extending tiki-wiki’s pages requires a helluva lot of effort OR breaking the twiki upgrade path
• There’s no easy way for any other comedian to interface with the page, making adding/moving comedians very difficult unless. . . once again . . . I extend the heck out of it and break the upgrade path.
• Finally, the page scrolls left to right across columns, not vertically as the eye expects. This is a flaw in my code, but is still an overall weakness.

So I’ve cobbled together a development environment for RoR, imported the comedian listing into a new MySQL database, and whipped together the functionality I need.
Took all day for the “15 minute blog” framework, but that’s my ignorance at work.

Here’s some juicy bits for anyone’s who’s still reading: this is the framework I used to solve the multi-column display in ChicagoStandup 2.0. If you work with multiple columns at all, this is a fantastic way to have them behave appropriately without resorting to tables.
Quite a gem, and I’m glad Randy Simons did all the work. Cheers, Randy, you saved me a ton of time.