They hired me because I’m a nerd and I know my machines, so I’m going to sidestep the benefits chatter and talk about the real reason I’m posting:

The MacBook Pro (v4) Penryn. I’m not too big an OS X fan, too many of its design choices annoy me too often for me to want to spend a lot of work time in that environment, so I instantly resized the partition, installed rEFIt (a graphical EFI bootloader), and installed Ubuntu 8.04.

Here’s what didn’t work out of box:

• Wifi
• Touchpad
• Graphics Acceleration
• Some wierdness with keyboard

The wifi and graphics acceleration was a snap to fix. Graphics, provided by NVidia, means that I was using this beautiful piece to drive a 30″ (or so) widescreen monitor in thirty seconds. After years of struggling with older ATI drivers on unsupported hardware, this was a breath of fresh air. The WiFi still has no linux-native driver, but ndiswrapper means I can use it reliably anyway.

The weirdness about the keyboard is not really a functional problem: there are some differences between mac keyboards and windows ones that I will have to get used to–and map some key combinations to get around. The lack of “end” and “home” keys is a real sore point… and the position of ctrl, opt (alt), and cmd keys makes some things a bit less easy on the hands than on other keyboards.

The touchpad is the most intriguing one. Penryn has a multitouch-sensitive pad which allows for awesome things like two-fingered tap for right click, two-fingered touch-anywhere scrolling, and other finger gestures under OS X. I played with it for a while before figuring it out, but I finally did it: two fingered scrolling and two-fingered right click (as well as three-fingered middle) under Ubuntu.

I know when I say it on here it sounds uninteresting, but believe me: This is the best interface for a laptop since we moved to the trackpad from the old style “nubbins”.

Previous problems were:

• BCM43xx Wireless (Didn’t work until Edgy, had to use NDiswrapper until Gutsy)
• ATI 300M Graphics (unable to get reliable hardware acceleration until Hardy)
• ACPI Support (Unable to sleep or hibernate until Hardy)

The most important improvement was that the ATI driver now has working ACPI support, meaning that I can put my computer to sleep and throw it in my bag, carry it around, and open up to continue working on what I’m doing. Nice!

It is beginning to ruin my life however. Before the Sleep function worked, I had to keep my browsing and coding in neat little sessions: Remember to save, quit, put a note on the desktop to remind me of what I was doing, then shut down.

Why do all of that when I can just put it to sleep?! Two reasons:

• I open it up and find three browsers open with twelve tabs each, and have *no idea* what’s important
• Without a sticky note to tell me what I was working on, I just have a bunch of text editors open with random code.

The idea here is actually one seen in code: Garbage collection. Shutting down was like taking a note of all the things I was working on (shifting the active memory over), then neatly closing out everything (freeing the old space), then eventually turning it back on and lazily reopening the things I need. Without it, I have all of this unfreed memory cluttering my desktop and slowing down my context switches!

Ah well. I guess now is as good a time as any to learn some organization.

I read in the paper the other day, yet another voter remarking their impression that “A vote for Hillary is just another vote for Bill, and he’s had his chance.” This common logic must be absolutely infuriating for you. Over the years you have shown yourself an incredibly intelligent, accomplished, and affluent woman in your own right, and just a quick glance at your Wikipedia entry (a dubious source perhaps, but the citations on that article are too many to re-list here), shows a list of feats so incredible that I am ashamed for those that would only recognize the feats of your husband.

According to the article, you had repeatedly denied Bill your hand in marriage before eventually consenting. When you did eventually marry, it states that you “still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that [your] separate identity would be lost and that [your] accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else’s.” (Wikipedia.org)

While I do not claim to have done the due dilligence of checking the article’s sources, nor have I read your book, I now wish that I had, and will go purchase a copy of “Living History” immediately. If, however, the words in this article are true, then it must absolutely sting to know that your fears have come to light for many Americans, and only because you selflessly helped to campaign for your husband when you were still an active and well respected lawyer.

Madame Senator, you have more than earned the respect of myself, and of the nation, and I wish you only the best luck as you continue your campaign for the Presidency.

Thank you,

Adrian Sud

Something like that already exists, in the form of Nautilus scripts. Some creative Googling found the ones from here, which is actually fairly basic. So I started with that and made it way better. Here’s how mine works:

- It uses a single mount point, /media/isoimage.
- If you run the script and something is already mounted there, it will ask if you want to unmount.
- If the directory already exists, it’ll ask you if you’d like to delete it–which it will fail to do if there are items in it.
- If there’s nothing mounted, it’ll attempt to mount whatever is passed in to it.
- If it succeeds, it offers the option to open it.

TODO: Make sure what was passed in is an iso file
TODO: Support other types of disk images

You can get my script here.

To set it up (the preferred way):

Open a terminal, navigate to the directory you downloaded my script to, and type the following:

adrian@Kashra ~$ chmod +x ./isomount && sudo mv ./isomount /usr/bin/isomount

Enter your password, then it should be set up.

Find an ‘iso’ you want to mount, and right click it, go to “Select program”, and in the text box, type in “isomount”. Then the next time you want to mount/unmount an iso image, just right click and select my script!

To set it up as a Nautilus Script:
Disadvantages: Does not show up for all users, and shows up on all files (not just isos).

Open the terminal, navigate to the directory you downloaded the script too, and enter the following:

adrian@Kashra: ~$ chmod +x ./isomount && mv ./isomount ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/isomount

And you’re done. Note that you will still need administrative privileges to mount the iso itself.

Find an ‘iso’ you want to mount, right click it, select nautilus-scripts, and click on isomount!

Television Viewers.

Now in reality, I watch exactly two television shows that have not been cancelled, and two television shows besides. The two that aren’t over yet are Heroes (NBC) and Battlestar: Galactica (Sci-Fi). The two that are were Firefly (FOX) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC). Given this fact I really don’t consider myself a television viewer.

Therefore, let me explain why I’m mad at you people:

It’s because of Studio 60. Aaron Sorkin’s amazing talent for blindingly crisp dialog aside, this was an amazing show with a fantastic cast, and a solid concept. I could get mad that the show was taken off the air, but it was taken off the air when it just… failed to draw audiences.

Now, Firefly failed to draw audiences, but to be frank, it was never given an honest shot, what with multiple changes in its time slot, last minute reordering of episodes, and frankly poor advertising.

Studio 60 was given more than an honest shot.

Actually, it was given the slot before prime time, right there with Heroes, a dumb but extremely entertaining show I expect to stay on the air for quite a while. Studio 60 had a decent opening audience which faltered immediately, and continued to flounder, even when NBC tried to get people back into the show by having Masi Oka (plays Hiro on Heroes) make a cameo. It eventually sputtered and they pulled it.

The problem was the show was smart. It was based on the premise that the fictional broadcasting company NBS was banking on American audiences not being “too dumb” for good television. The real thing was that NBC itself was banking on the same proposition, and we as audiences let them down. We showed them that we are indeed too dumb for good television.

So there you are, everyone who tuned in at 10 to watch that first season of Heroes but missed the good stuff that was on at 9pm, I’m mad at you tonight.

(oh, I’m extremely glad I own the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Complete Series.)

They wrote that these machines are supposed to select and aim at a target, and “[wait] only for a human to pull the trigger.” Except that sometimes, “these machines start firing mysteriously on their own.”

They call it a software glitch. A malfunction. The problem I have with these terms is that, similar to the term “accident” in a traffic collision, they tend to imply no one is to blame.

I submit that somewhere, some programmer is to blame. If you write code, no matter how trivial, your job is to ensure the efficiency, consistency, and most of all the accuracy of your code. To fail in this regard can be tantamount to negligent homicide.

Coding errors can cause great cost; in the simplest of projects, this cost may only be in time, but soon that cost becomes money. In greater projects, it might be personal possessions, or public relations, or in still greater projects, lives.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I am reminded of the infamous Therac-25, which between 1985 and 1987 was involved in at least five deaths due to poor interface design and failure to sanitize inputs. The Northeast Blackout of 2003, caused by a race condition in power monitoring software. The MIM-104 Patriot whose failure resulted in the deaths of 28 soldiers in Saudi Arabia in 1991 due to an error in time synchronization.

These are our responsibilities, laid upon us by virtue of our interest in the technologies which run our world today and those that will tomorrow: To provide value through technology by relieving stresses in tasks, or by relieving those tasks altogether, and to protect ourselves and our fellow man from those very technologies we create, and to the best of our abilities, from himself.

~Pigsflew

According to Reisinger, linux has either three directions from here: 1. Become super user-friendly at the expense of the tweakability and under-the-hood capacity of linux, 2. go back to “linux’ roots” and follow Linus Torvalds, or (and here I quote) 3. “face a “civil war” that could lead to total Linux annihilation.”

I’d like to present something to you. In the good old days of the Microsoft world, we had MSDOS, a relabeled version of the “Quick and Dirty Operating System”, QDOS. In this world, everything was configurable. You could do anything you wanted. Unfortunately, because doing anything complicated took too many steps, people didn’t often do much. This is why they developed (following Apple), Windows. Now Windows didn’t do much, but what it did do was easier and more honed to human beings than was the command prompt.

Windows took a step further from that with WinXP and Vista, wherein the command prompt, while still there, is crippled to the point of being barely usable.

On the other hand, Apple’s newest, OSX, is a BSD-derivative operating system, and while it has a fully functional and exceptionally usable GUI, it also has a complete shell available to the user, with approximately all the tools from Linux/BSD available.

This “civil war” Reisinger presents is a fear that’s ungrounded. I am an Ubuntu user. This is because the simple tasks that I perform on a daily basis, as well as the setup tasks that prepare the machine to meet my standards, are made extremely easy for me, and with minimal interference. It’s important to me that the terminal remain always available to me, that I can still write and run bash scripts, that, when it’s faster to do so, I can still fire up a shell.

But I shouldn’t be forced to.

This is where the dichotomy becomes entirely flawed. There is nothing that says an operating system can not be both oriented toward usability, and fundamentally malleable. A person should be able to fire up an application and have it, within reasonable tolerances, do what he or she expects. This is a mark of a conscientious programmer; any code which is not designed with, or with the ability to have, a GUI attached should be viewed as nearly wasted code.

Linux’ roots are the same place that any other operating system’s roots are: a collection of applications and machine code which enables the user to utilize the capabilities of the machine. An operating system which does not do this is an unfinished operating system.

Unlike any other operating system, we can keep working together to finish Linux.

I want other people to use Ubuntu. I’ve been putting up posters, wearing stickers, giving out burned copies, telling people about it, I’ve been evangelizing this because as an OS, Ubuntu is almost finished. It’s friendly, it’s usable, and I don’t have to hold a newcomer’s hand quite as hard to get them into it. It’s not about money, because I can’t, don’t, and won’t ask for any–and I don’t think Canonical ever will either.

What I want is users. I want a whole boatload of us. I want enough of us out there that choose Linux over non-*nix that open source libraries start getting used to reach us. I want games designed by corporations in OpenGL2, rather than DirectX. I want applications to be released using Mono instead of .Net; I want these things to happen so that anyone, anywhere, on any operating system–Even Windows!–can use everyone else’s software. And that’s only plausible if we get attention.

So I applaud Mozilla for providing the best cross-platform browser and email client, Canonical for the easiest Linux distribution, HP for their open printer drivers, System76 and Dell for providing preinstalled machines, Blizzard for already releasing OpenGL games (like World of Warcraft), and all other companies that stand behind the choice of the user.

And I seriously pity anyone who didn’t go.

They had jugglers. Live music. The best jungle gym ever. There were playpen balls and random toys. There was a mattress that got signed by Randall and I jumped off the jungle gym onto it. There was a dancing velociraptor. There was a dancing velociraptor.

This was amazing.

I wish there was Banshee for windows.

Now, originally (as with many linux music players and media management systems), it feels like Banshee was born out of the sentiment, “I wish there was iTunes for Linux”, but I’m using iTunes right now, and you know what? It’s not as good, and it’s not really iTunes’ fault, nor is it Banshee’s.

It’s Quicktime versus GStreamer.

You see, iTunes uses the Quicktime backend in order to play music, which gives it support for MP3, AAC, and (given a plugin) OGG files, and some others.

Windows Media Player also has its own backend, which provides support for MP3 and WMA, and given plugins a bunch of other filetypes.

GStreamer is one of a few media backends that run on many open source distributions, and powers most of their players, including Banshee. It has three basic sets of plugins: The ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’, and the ‘Ugly’. ‘Good’ plugins are for formats which are free and open source (Like OGG and FLAC). ‘Bad’ plugins are those that are free and open source, but that aren’t stable enough to be considered ‘good’. The ‘Ugly’ are codecs which have licensing issues, e.g. they may not be free of patents, etc. (thanks Anonymous for the correction)

With the GStreamer backend, one can play virtually any kind of file at all, as long as it is not encrypted.

What I noticed was that because MP3 lost its luster for me a while ago and I switched to FLAC, I can now only play approximately a quarter of my music library from iTunes on Windows.

Now, about a year ago I would have encoded all my files as MP3’s at 192 bits per second, and beyond that I would not care about the quality loss because I couldn’t hear it in the resultant files. This gets problematic however, because I write songs to CD’s. Taking a song as WAV, converting to MP3, and back, twice, can cause a drastic loss of sound quality because each conversion compounds the loss. FLAC, on the other hand is a variable bitrate format, so that if there is not much “happening” in the song, it will be a very small filesize, but the more detail there is, the higher the bitrate will raise. Theoretically, one should be able to convert from FLAC to WAV and back a hundred times without any problems.

I’m not a huge sound buff, but geez… I wish there was GStreamer for Windows.

This program effectively spews out information for every packet, in or out, that touches the selected interface. Here’s something I noticed this morning:

The internet ebbs and flows. Like the endpoint computer is a pristine beach on the sea of information, packets rolling in and out in bunches; the local computer responds to everything that comes in, and a quarter of a second passes before the next incoming wave arrives. And while it may be something people have remarked upon before, this is the first time I realized how true it is: I’m watching the waves crash in and out as I write this. If the browser is like scuba gear for safely navigating the water, then TCPDump and WinDump are the beach towel, so I can sit here, sip my powerade, and enjoy the view.

this is nice.