A Day without Penguins...

...is like a day without Linux -- and vice versa. I just spent an entire day and two nights locked in the s/cr/AAPL Cupertino BSD operating system, also known as MacOSX, after my Linux install got ill all of a sudden. That's about the longest time I have spent inside the Mac OS in 2010. The OS X icon previews are nice. I always liked the right-click-on-finder-window-titlebar-to-view-folder-hierarchy-and-go-up-a-level feature that appeared around 8.5 or 9.1 or something and which lives on, although there are better ways of navigating in Nautilus or Dolphin. Everything else is about the same as Linux. The Mac OS is a little like being locked into a corporate headquarters overnight, I figure. It's a successful company, and looks nice, but it doesn't feel like home, more like being in a corporate cubicle. Linux is more like being in your own home of your own design, made from a variety of prefab elements. In this analogy, Windows is a FEMA trailer, full of toxic formaldehyde and requiring powerful fans and ventilation to prevent a nosebleed, and possible death.

I don't know what was wrong in Ubuntu, but there was some glitchy window behavior, and instead of logging out and back in, I chose to restart. I think there was a kernel update or something that cued me to restart, and this may have followed the glitchiness, meaning something was not installed correctly. EFI, or rather, rEFIt, was OK, GRUB was OK, but then some text scrolled by complaining of a flaky scsi drive and dropping me into a Busybox shell, where I initially had no idea what to do. After returning from the Mac side (and running Disk Utility over there), things were basically the same, but I got a few seconds farther to an Ubuntu Studio splash screen before being asked to Repair, Continue, do something else, or More information, before that crashed and dropped me back into the shell again. This time I chose to "fsck" which did a number of repairs to inodes and whatever and allowed me to reboot into a repaired Ubuntu Lucid. I ran Update Manager immediately, and noticed one update called dmsetup addressing some bad code which the update offers to "take out back and shoot it in the head." That sounded good, so I did that. I may never know, but that could have had something to do with my system suddenly flaking. The take-away, if there is one, is to go ahead and fsck the system, if you think that might help.

Radio Streams +

There are several audio players and managers in Linux which function as alternatives to iTunes. I started off using the default application (for Ubuntu) Rhythmbox but later switched to Banshee as Rhythmbox had a few unacceptable problems: not transferring tracks to an iPod on occasion, not downloading podcasts on occasion, and not playing music on occasion. I have also tried Amarok, Exaile, Songbird, and a few other minor ones but all of these failed to support iPods, podcasts, or my computer's audio. I need iPod support because I have a few iPods around and probably will for a long time, although the mass-storage USB is a much better way than the closed iTunes-managed corporate podware which crAAPL grants its devotees.

I recently misplaced the (2005?) 1st-generation Shuffle that never seemed to die, so I went to a second or third generation clippy Shuffle Emerald(?) that someone else didn't need. My needs are simple: just to be able to play 3-6 hours of podcasts and some music every day during my commutes. Banshee doesn't recognize it, so I've switched back to Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox seems to be working better than before, so far, although some podcasts seem to go offline much of the time.

One thing I noticed when I was giving Exaile a spin again was the excellent selection of internet radio stations. Because they are pre-installed in Exaile, you tend to use them. I decided to add some radio stations to the poor selection that pre-exists in Rhythmbox. Here are the URLs I added, in rough order from higher bitrates to lower. I can't stand commercials, so I selected mostly public and college radio.

KEXP
http://kexp-mp3-2.cac.washington.edu:8000/listen.pls
128kbps

KCRW
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwlive.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwmusic.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwnews.pls
64kbps

WGBH Boston
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1274610
64kbps

KUNI
http://134.161.228.190:8000/listen.pls
64kbps

IPR
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1279144
64kbps

WBUR.org - Boston's NPR news source
http://audio.wbur.org/stream/live_mp3.m3u
47kbps

KPFK
http://sc1.mainstreamnetwork.com:9042/listen.pls
32kbps

WNYC
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-fm939/mp3.pls
32kbps
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-am820/mp3.pls
32kbps

WKCR Columbia University NY
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1211987
http://kanga.college.columbia.edu:8000/listen.pls
24kbps

In addition to those, I am still looking into these:

Soma FM - 19 unique channels
http://somafm.com/

That's beginning to be too much choice.

One of the best places to search is Shoutcast.

Shoutcast - "39,740 free internet radio stations"
http://www.shoutcast.com/

If you don't find what you are looking for there, try radio-locator, which lets you search by city, zip-code, country, format (genre), or call letters.

radio-locator
http://www.radio-locator.com/

Update: Rhythmbox still sucks. "...could not parse the feed contents..." Banshee chocked on the iPod mb229 a few more times but finally rebuilt the database without crashing and now is good. Banshee wins.
Here's another way to rebuild the (Shuffle) database.

Ubuntu Upgrades

Recently Linux visitors to my site seem to outnumber Mac visitors, sometimes by 2 to 1. Ten percent of visitors are from Japan (at the moment), so those LXers are not just me re-loading my own page. I really do think there could be a stampede to Linux in the form of Google's Chrome OS. I'd like to see Chrome pass Mac OS and get alot of attention in the process, bursting Steve's bubble. I expect that it has a fairly good chance of doing that and becoming a phenomenon similar to what they've done with Android. This might make a major dent in the Microsoft monopoly or Win-Mac duopoly.

I recently upgraded two machines to Ubuntu 10.04.1. I hadn't made the change earlier because Lucid came out in late April, several weeks into the first semester of the new school year in Japan. And since I immediately went on vacation in August, I didn't have a chance to install until late August. The exception is the Asus Eee 4G, my most expendable computer and therefore a test bed, which has had Xubuntu 10.04 on the SSD and Ubuntu 10.04 on the SD card and which performed excellently as a vacation computer, within the limitations of the 7" screen and a slow processor. That's a configuration I can recommend; I usually boot the SD Ubuntu rather than the Xubuntu option.

The two others were the Asus 1000HE and the Apple Mac Mini. I upgraded the 1000HE through the Update Manager (Preferences>Update Manager>Distribution Upgrade). That seemed to go well, but afterwards the computer had devolved into the Netbook Edition that it had begun as long ago when I first made it dual-boot. I despise the Netbook Edition since it uses space less efficiently than regular Ubuntu. However, it was a deformed and disfigured Netbook Edition, with a stub menu and nothing there. I was able to add an item to the menu and restart it. I found that the solution is to select a GNOME session at startup, not Netbook Edition, and then use Synaptic to remove all Netbook Edition packages so it can only boot as GNOME or something equally reasonable at startup. If Lucid is stable on this machine I may be able to stick with that for a few years. Some Skype test calls were a little dodgy at first; I'll have to check some real calls to see if audio is really OK.

I was a little worried about the Mac Mini since the install seems rather fragile, and after rEFIt hands the boot off to GRUB2, it all took about 5-7 minutes to re-boot. Of course, you could go months between reboots. I usually log out and log back in if something appears glitchy. Sometimes it froze during bootup and I worried that it was lost. I used an Ubuntu Studio DVD for this upgrade. It went very well, although it didn't seem to transform from Edubuntu to Ubuntu Studio as I had thought it would. Perhaps only packages relevant to Edubuntu were upgraded from the DVD as one source, the rest from the internet. Performance has improved: the Mac Mini goes to sleep and the on/off/sleep light pulses gently as it does as a Mac, Bluetooth is working perfectly now where it didn't before (or maybe I was just doing it wrong before?), and that troublesome bootup is now about 2-3 minutes, slightly long but better than some Windows machines I use in universities and perhaps just about par for the Linux-on-a-Mac course.

The UNE is a waste because you can simply set your top (and bottom) panels to auto-hide by configuring them with a right-click. This saves more space than the UNE. In addition, the UNE launcher is a huge waste of space and time. Using GNOME Main Menu, you can have a single icon in the auto-hide menubar and with a single click, drag, and release open any application. Using F11 toggles the tab I am viewing in and out of full screen view. The "Run" applet in the menu bar lets you launch an app with a few letters of its name. By comparison, the launcher of UNE requires a click (on the ever-present menubar) to bring it forward, another click to navigate to the right section, a few more clicks or scrollwheel to scroll down the list of apps (which are not the size of text but have huge space-wasting icons and the name of the app in a box!) and finally a click on the icon to launch the app which will then appear in the tiny space left available to you in UNE. Just use regular Ubuntu is my advice (or Debian or Mint or Mandriva or openSuSE...). I am not a fan of "Docks" either.

Update: Not only does sleep work, bluetooth work, and bootup go faster, "Restart" works properly now, too. In 9.10, I had shutdown but restart went to darkness requiring physically powering off. There have been a few new Linux kernel updates and thus a few restarts recently. It takes about 1 minute 15 seconds from selecting "Restart" until the EFI/rEFIt/BootCamp stuff goes away and GRUB comes into the scene, then one minute to my Login screen and about 30 seconds (?) more after that. I guess it's OK. Anyway, there is much better support for the 2009 Mac Mini in Lucid than in Karmic.

Eels: Tomorrow Morning

I ran across this new interview with E about a week ago.



Tomorrow Morning is something to look forward to. By the way, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives has become available again on YouTube after having been taken down sometime after I last referred to it. ("This video has been removed due to a copyright claim by the BBC.")You may want to DLHelper yourself to those mp4s before they get taken down again, because the price of buying the dvd ($40.49!) is a ridiculous price to pay for not recording it when it was broadcast on TV.

Just for the hell of it, here's an NPR interview from June 2009.



...and an official Eels video from April 2009.

1975-08-20

Macbots and Dia Sobin have noted the passing of Mac Tonnies' birthday on August 20. Coincidentally, Mac's birthday was the launch date for the Viking 1 lander. Almost a year later, on July 25, 1976, the "Face on Mars" was photographed by the Viking Orbiter 1 as it examined possible landing sites for Viking 2.

Mac Tonnies-tagged content continues to be created on the internets despite his physical death. Below are some recent YouTube movies.

Question authority.
Empower yourself.
Seek truth.

I haven't been blogging much because I was travelling. In fact, August 20 itself was a day that partly disappeared for me as my plane crossed the international date line. However, I kept my cellphone on Tokyo time, and photos of my visit to the Science Fiction Museum (and Experience Music Project) of Seattle are all dated 2010-08-20.

Those were 2010-08-20 in Japan but this last one was 2010-08-20 in the US, the last shot I took before leaving.

Efforts are being made to name a crater on Mars for Mac Tonnies. If interested, you can join a Facebook group dedicated to it.

Kujira Katsu くじらカツ

Kujira Katsu くじらカツ, or Whale Cutlets, in the cafeteria of a university where I teach. You can see the dark beefiness of the meat compared to the lighter-colored chicken cutlets on the left. The price is right. Add a ¥31 bowl of negi-tofu miso-shiru and a bowl of rice for ¥100 and you're set for under ¥400. I wouldn't order it but I have tasted whale before.

Made On A Mac with Ubuntu (& GIMP)

I don't actually recommend getting a Mac if you want to run Linux, but that's what I have. Not only because I had the legacy PowerPC architecture, which Apple barely supports anymore--although Debian and other Linux distros do, but because I wanted the small, light, cheap, quiet, Intel-powered, MacOSX-(as a fallback)-capable Mac Mini. That turns out to have been a mistake, as I virtually never boot MacOSX and the "SuperDrive" super-failed. It is quiet, however, unlike the PowerPC and its ever-roaring fan that kept us awake on the next floor unless you manually selected Sleep. For those of us who have taken this path, here is my rendition of Made on a Mac in Ubuntu, with GIMP logo optional, 216x216 and smaller. For people who want to run Linux, at the moment I'd recommend ASUS (reliability reports) and Ubuntu (userbase size, package selection, polish, and commitment to language support) as my first choices.



What happened to the Drop Shadow I added to the Ubuntu logo, I don't know... either it disappeared when I saved it as a png instead of a jpg, or I forgot to save that particular change. So be it.

Karoshi?

Karoshi (?) may not be the best name for a school-oriented Linux distribution, imho. Teachers do work hard, but I'm not sure if the creators didn't do their research or were deliberately being ironic. Karoshi is also the name of a game that came out in 2008.

Legalize Arizona

A check of the relevant papers has determined that Arizona entered the United States illegally. The state has been returned to Mexico.

Revisiting Constructed Languages

I took a constructed language walkabout today, reading about the USA in constructed languages:

Mergu'e (Lojban)
http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/mergu
That's almost 100% unintelligible words.


Statos Unite de America (Interlingua)
http://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statos_Unite_de_America
That's almost 100% intelligible to any educated westerner.


Unionita Stati di Amerika, abreviata Usa, (Ido)
http://io.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa
Ido is an offspring of Esperanto--and an improvement. Notice it's now the "Wikipedio".


Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko (=Usono) (Esperanto)
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usono
Diacritics suck. Who needs 'em? (It's the "Vikipedio")
And too much inflection. I want an isolating language.
Sorry, Esperanto. It's a shame.


Unionati States de Amerika (Novial)
http://nov.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionati_States_de_Amerika
(It's the WikipediE)


Lamerikän (Volapük)
http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA
(In the Vükiped)


Lojban is really going to have an uphill struggle.
Lojban picture dictionary: (pixra liste loi gismu)
http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/pixra_liste_loi_gismu

I like the ideas of Lojban in principle (when reading about it), but in practice (when reading in it), I'm more inclined to favor Interlingua after a brief tour of the constructed languages wikipedia pages for Mergu'e, also known as Statos Unite de America, Unionita Stati di Amerika, Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko, Unionati States de Amerika, and Lamerikän.

A lot of linguistic cruft is disposed of with the principle that if one language doesn't have it (a linguistic feature) then Interlingua doesn't need it. It must be 5 times easier than learning Spanish. I wish they could teach that to kids in elementary school as a prelude to going on to Spanish or French or something else.

Interlingua could be a good language for the EU. They can't always provide a translation for every document in every language but an Interlingua version could be a neutral compromise.

Lojban has been criticized as Procrustean, re-inventing the wheel of the language corpus from the most commonly co-occurring phonemes of Chinese, English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Hindi/Urdu, and as a result producing words unintelligible to any speaker.

The reason I was thinking about this was because of a new constructed language which I read about: ROILA, the RObot Interaction LAnguage.

The flow just won't stop:-(

As thousands of sea birds, endangered turtles, fish, and wildlife of all kinds lay dying in a sea of oil, millions of Americans were disappointed today to see the live video feed showing that the valve work has failed to stop the flow of blood to Dick Cheney's brain.

"Paul the Octopus" vs "Sarah Palin"

Paul the Octopus is currently leading Sarah Palin in the polls for the preferred Republican Presidential candidate in 2012. Voters are weighing doubts about the candidate's eligibility for the office and a suspected foreign place of birth with the possibility that the other candidate's brain is a sac of water. The creature's "brain", or water-filled sac, is believed to help propel the creature through the surrounding media.

Octoracle

The lyrics as well as I can make out:

Paul the Octopus
by Aiden Ajar

I'm just a cephalopod
I'm only 2 years old
oh--but I'm the 8 legged oracle
or so I'm told

oh wonderful octopus
you're the great prophet of our time
we need a leader to reveal us truth
if I feed you mussels will you please be mine?

all attention will be on your tank
we'll base our lives on the way you behave
be our master, be our saviour
most of all be our slave

I'm just a cephalopod
I've never even seen a tv
oh you think that I control your destiny
oh I don't even know I live in Germany

oh terrible octopus
you're the worst mollusk of our time
we needed you to reveal us truth
--well, I suppose you did but we do not like the truth--
we hold you responsible
off with your tentacles
I will eat you
I will eat you
I will eat you

I'm just a cephalopod
I don't even know what FIFA is!
don't barbecue me
don't cut me into pieces
don't crucify me
I never asked to be your jesus...

(edited 2010¤07·16°)

Carry On My Hayward Son

Hayward (as in Tony) sounds a little like "wayward". It makes a guy think...


Carry On My Hayward Son
(adopted from KANSAS)

Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more

Once I sank below the noise and confusion
"Beyond Petroleum" was just an illusion
I was drilling ever deeper
But I drilled too deep

Killed eleven on the rig in the fire
Burned alive to help our stock price go higher
I hear the voices when I'm drilling
I can hear them say

Refrain
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more


Tried the Top Hat and the Junk Shot and Top Kill
Lied to everyone about how much we spill
"Boot on your neck!" said Salazar
but his balls are in our jar.

On a stormy sea of moving emulsion
Nauseated by oceanic revulsion
I try to hide it with dispersent
But I hear the voices say

Refrain
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more

No!

Carry on, you will always remember
Carry on, it's the fault of the vendor
Blowout preventer from Transocean
Halliburton's concrete plug

Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill (don't you spill no more)



The original lyrics are not irrelevant to the situation, either.

(by KANSAS)
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more

Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high

Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I hear the voices when I'm dreaming
I can hear them say

{Refrain

Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, well
It surely means that I don't know

On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune
But I hear the voices say

{Refrain
No!

Carry on, you will always remember
Carry on, nothing equals the splendor
The center lights around your vanity
But surely heaven waits for you

Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry (don't you cry no more)

Congratulations!

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/robot-graduation-party/

"Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source robotics software platform. The hardware isn’t open but the company has created open source programming to drive the machine. Willow Garage’s Robot Operating System (ROS) originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs."

BP-irates of the Caribbean

BP-irates of the Caribbean: "Dead Man's Deepwater Horizon" -- coming soon to a coastline near you!

Update: Perfectionism kicked in; I wasn't happy with kwik'n'dirty version and edited it.

Ubuntini

New Kevin, the Koncerned Kommuter

Another annoying entry in the
series, not only because the kid could be listening to his lectures, but the drunk salariman or group of three housewives are usually the ones shouting to talk louder than the volume of a noisy train, which makes it doubly difficult to hear anything on earbuds. Nobody says a word to them -- it's a noisy train, after all-- but harrassing people for the whisper of noise that might escape from their earbuds in the seconds stopping at the station is encouraged. It's bizarre, but at least someone broke Kevin's leg again last month.
I think the music-lover may be misinterpreting Kevin as an oversensitive victim, when he's just digging out some ear wax in his spare time.
The campaign seems to be running out of ideas, recycling the same nonsense, although they've gone to positive (?) behaviors now. Try people who sneeze all over others without covering their mouths, and the ones who pick their noses and flick it onto other passengers? Maybe it's not good manners to attack the retarded, though.

Malware Warning from Big Brother Google

I visited my own site and found it was blocked as containing a link to malware on theforeigner.



I didn't want to be bullied by Google into blocking sites that may not be evil. However, the diagnostic site at Google does have evidence of evil at theforeigner. That doesn't necessarily mean that theforeigner were the perps or had any knowledge of it, but I removed the links from my sidebar. I rarely visit the sites that are in my sidebar anyway.



Happy surfing!

De-Macify your Ubuntu!

The new Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" Linux distribution went with the undemocratic decision to move the Menu, Close, Minimize, and Maximize buttons from the right to the left! This may be good for Mac users, but having already broken my 15-year-old Mac habit, I prefer to keep the buttons on the right. I won't be upgrading my OS right away anyway, as everything is working well now, but eventually I will switch to 10.04. When I do so, I will immediately move the buttons back to the right using gconf-editor as explained at UbuStu and How-to Geek, among other places. I do think Ubuntu has damaged their standing with this move. It's put me off a little bit. I think many users will migrate downstream to Mint or upstream to Debian. I have been considering Debian, in particular Skolelinux to replace Edubuntu. I've also been considering a more multimedia-oriented distro such as Ubuntu Studio since it seems that in audio and video is where Linux fails or falls short of the ease of use of Mac, so I would like that functionality to be the best it can be and see if it can compete.

I've not upgraded the distribution, but have changed to Shiki-Dust as the window border and Breathe as the icon theme instead of Gartoon. I changed to a grassy desktop wallpaper, too.

Incidentally, the Mac Mini I am using as my main computer is a POS. The "Superdrive" doesn't work at all, with any OS, so I have attached the Buffalo branded portable CD drive that I bought to use with my ASUS 1000HE. Also, the hard drive is the only one among various drives, up to 10 years old, that shows bad blocks and may be failing. This, although I bought it last June! I was considering returning it under warranty, but I don't know how long that would take, and at least the Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB memory works OK; that's all I need. I regret that I won't be able to contribute to showing Apple's truly bad performance, but since I resolve to not buy an AAPL again, maybe that will be enough. It has been a big mistake. It takes Linux 5 minutes to boot on this machine, and it's not dependable. I don't really need the Mac OS to fall back on as an OS, and if I did, I could have used the older 2003 and earlier PowerPCs upstairs in the PC Lounge and Museum, formerly known as the PowerPC Lounge and Museum.

I was recently offered a Fujitsu "FMV Deskpower CE7/857"with Windows Millenium Edition still installed. I accepted it and found it readily let me install Fedora (which I rejected because it seemed like a pain to install the mp3 and dvd codecs), then MEPIS (which was better but still lacked some codecs and was ugly in a bad-kde way), and finally Xubuntu (9.10), which was attractive and worked well once I connected it, downloaded the codecs and input methods, VLC, etc, and made it into a multi-regional DVD player. The machine does have the unusual habit of randomly opening the DVD/CD tray every few hours, but this doesn't seem to disrupt playing a movie or even installing software; I simply push the button and it goes back in and resumes the movie or install. As free junk, it has better value than the Mac Mini, as it can play DVDs and happily runs any Linux you care to put on it.