So I’ve had a problem for a while and haven’t bothered looking into it until now. When a web page loads flash with sound, it either: a) doesn’t play if mpd is playing or b) prevents mpd from playing sound unless I close firefox. Obviously this was an extremely irritating behavior. I thought it was something to do with flash using the wrong sound driver, but it was right.

I finally actually looked into it. The fix is quite simple and painless. I had to configure mpd to use dmix (the alsa software mixer). All of the instructions are clearly laid out on the mpd wiki. Enjoy! (NOTE: For those unfamiliar with mpd it is music player daemon, my music player of choice. Check out their wiki for more information).

As an added bonus, I just learned RIT has a debian mirror: http://mirror.rit.edu! Thanks to the RITLUG, I can now fetch my upgrades much, much quicker.

So, I’ve only had about three months of down time. Pretty good, right? The problem: I had been hosting my website off of my desktop for a few months, but when it came time to move out to California for the summer, I realized this wasn’t going to work. I bought another computer to use as a server and left it with a friend. Unfortunately, there were a few hardware compatability issues with my hardware and my friend didn’t have much time to mess with it. Now that I’m back in Rochester, I spent a few days configuring the machine and now my machine/website is back up!