DNA Lounge update, wherein mostly photos are presented.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 040.

Tonight was the final Pop Roxx event.

To commemorate this, we gave away a bunch of compilation CDs of most of the bands who have played at Pop Roxx over the last two and a half years. It wasn't all of the bands, because there were too many to fit on an audio CD, so I had to leave a few off.

This week's mixtape is the "director's cut" of that CD: it's almost the complete set of Pop Roxx bands. (And yeah, I'm slightly breaking my "C90" rule for this one.) I'm only missing tracks by three bands (Pretty Vicious, Landshark, and Sunday Drivers). Somehow I managed not to get CDs by those bands, and I wasn't able to track down MP3s by them this week, alas.

We had a lot of great bands at Pop Roxx! I'll miss it.

Satire at the ballot box to 'honor' Bush

They want to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant come January, when the next president is sworn in. During the inauguration, the group also wants supporters to participate in a "synchronized flush" -- a way to send a gift to the renamed plant, which supporters say, would be a "fitting monument to this president's work."

It sounds like a harmless joke, or maybe a college civics lesson gone awry. But they have already collected 8,500 signatures in support of the plan - 1,300 more than the minimum needed to put the question to city voters in November.

The biggest opposition in this Democratic stronghold, McConnell said, is people who oppose naming anything after the 43rd president.

Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns the plant, say they get the humorous intent. But they note that the plant is an award-winning facility that keeps the city's streets and the ocean clean.

"If you are looking for a place to make a negative statement about the Bush administration's impact on the environment, this would be the last place to do it," agency spokesman Tony Winnicker said.

HELL YES:

San Francisco smokers are already banned from lighting up inside restaurants, bars and public buildings. Now Supervisor Chris Daly is proposing tougher restrictions, including no smoking in taxicabs, at outdoor cafes, in lines at the ATM, at farmer's markets and within 20 feet of the entrance to businesses.

The city's Department of Public Health says there's no safe level of second-hand smoke. "There's been research that shows the exposure in outdoor areas. The levels can be as toxic as indoor levels," said Alyonik Hrushow from the San Francisco Health Department.

Smokers may feel like pariahs in this city, but according to the American Lung Association, San Francisco is behind other cities including Belmont, Berkeley and Ross when it comes to trying to limit second-hand smoke.

This will be a slight hassle for us at the club, since we'll have to make people move farther down the block to smoke, but that's fine with me, because I find it absolutely disgusting to have to walk through that gauntlet of stench on the sidewalk in front of the exit door.

You're welcome to smoke, and to play with your own poop. Just keep your smoke, and your poop, off of me.

XScreenSaver 5.06 out now. Only one new hack this time, but it's a fine one, if I do say so myself. Also this includes a bunch of fixes related to adding, removing and resizing monitors (RANDR/Xinerama) on X11 systems, as I mentioned earlier. So please stress-test that junk. Or be devoured.

There's something you don't see every day:

A Powell-Mason cable car jumped the tracks while turning onto Powell Street just before midnight Sunday night, July 13, 2008, leaving at least four people injured.

I assumed they were, you know, attached.

Which led to me learning about that sand thing:

The track brake does the lion's share of the work. The friction between wood and steel is what primarily stops the car. Make that dry wood and dry steel. Wet equals slick... this is not good.

This is where sand comes to the rescue. A small pedal on the floor is pressed to drop sand on the rails. The wheels crush the sand into powder, the powder soaks up the moisture and provides -- the magic word -- friction!

Blind Russian Ravers

Ravers at the Aquamarine Open Air Festival in Kirzhach, 80 kilometres northeast of Moscow, began seeking medical help days after the show, complaining of eye and vision problems.

"They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80%, and regaining it is already impossible," Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying.

Partygoers say heavy rains forced organisers to erect massive tents for the all-night dance party. The damage seems to have been caused when laser beams that were intended for outdoor use to illuminate the sky, were somehow turned or reflected onto the crowd.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the clock ticks.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 039.

DNA Lounge update, wherein HOLY SHIT HOUSTON. OVER.

Dear Lazyweb,

I could use some Linux xscreensaver debugging help. I made some fairly large changes to make it cope with the brave new RANDR world where monitors can be hot-swapped and have their resolution changed willy-nilly. Please apply this patch and test some things for me, k? Launch xscreensaver with -verbose to see what it's actually up to.

"Bad" would be 1) crashing, 2) part of your desktop ever being incompletely blacked out by a screen saver, 3) running savers on video outputs that don't actually have monitors attached to them.

If you have (or can has) more than one monitor:

• Do they all go blank when xscreensaver activates?
• Do things look right if you add a monitor while the screen is blanked? While it is non-blanked?
• Likewise when changing the resolution of the monitors using the "xrandr" command.
• Does it correctly realize which monitors are actually attached to the system and in use?
• Try configuring your machine to use the old-style multi-screen mode (where you have displays :0.0 and :0.1, and no Xinerama or RANDR.) Does it still behave sanely?
• Can you configure your X server to use just the Xinerama extension and not the RANDR extension? Try that too.

If you have only one monitor, you can still test this. Use Ctrl-Alt-KeypadPlus and Ctrl-Alt-KeypadMinus to change the resolution of your monitor without changing the resolution of your desktop, so that bumping the mouse against the edge of the screen pans across your desktop. (You might need to turn off the Xinerama and RANDR extensions to make this work, I'm not sure.)

• When xscreensaver launches, the savers should always be the size of the monitor (you shouldn't be seeing a zoomed-in portion of the saver, you should be seeing the whole thing.)
• Lock the screen. While the screen is locked, zoom in and out. The xscreensaver window should stay the size of the visible portion of the screen.
• With the screen locked, bump the mouse against the edge of the screen. The screen should remain covered.

Please let me know how that goes...

Update: There's a new patch with a few fixes. Please try that instead!

We now resume your regularly scheduled mixtape programming. Please enjoy jwz mixtape 038.

DNA Lounge update, wherein we have angered The Lorax.