A.C.L.U. (Restore the rule of law)

In retrospect, the 2008 Obama presidential campaign looks like a slick marketing campaign. "Change we can believe in" had to be dreamt up by a marketing executive after extensive polling, the iconic poster and color schemes all look like they came out of a corporate campaign. It's no wonder there has been so little change. Coming from the one-party system of the Democratic Republican party, what more could we expect? The Democratic wing of the one-party state represents straightforward corporate capitalism with a populist survival instinct, while the Republican wing of the party represents crazy cowboy capitalism. The rulers have found it sufficient to allow the public, once every 2 to 4 years, a chance to flip this binary switch to the other setting and manufacture sufficient consent around that choice. Third parties have only been able to drain off a little of the power from the binary party system. I'm glad I didn't vote for Obama or send money to him. Money, if one has it to donate, should go to Democracy Now, the ACLU, or, if possible, perhaps Wikileaks, since they are the ones to do what was once the work of a free press. Third parties in the US should unite with a program to break the one-binary-party system with Preferential Voting. In the best case, candidates of the Democratic-Republicans would also feel pressured to support Preferential Voting in order to win election, and local, state, and national offices. This would at least have a chance to break the system open to free competition by third parties.

When Obama took office, there was some hope that he would enforce the laws and defend the Constitution of the United States, arresting war criminals and torturers of the previous administration. Ideally, this could have meant reviewing any and all laws passed during the previous administration, having referendums on judges and appointees of the previous eight years, reviewing the qualifications of all federal employees added during the Bush administration (a great cost-cutting measure, and they can be replaced with non-nutjob Obama appointees). None of this was to happen, as the Obamas decided to look forward rather than backwards. Given the pile of things to do, and the choices that had to be made, that may have been the best and most positive choice. Perhaps it will even work politically for Obama in 2012. In any case, the moment when justice was possible is gone. Now they will have to deal with the crap thrown at them by a Republican congress.

This is from the ACLU website. It is full of hope for justice, but the hope that torture would be properly dealt with seems to be fading as people accept the reality of an Obama administration that has little or no more respect for civil liberties, open government, or human rights than the previous administration did.

In order to restore the rule of law and the credibility of the American justice system, there must be a thorough investigation of those who ordered and authorized the Bush administration's torture policies. Torture is a crime, and the fact that crimes were committed during the interrogations of detainees can no longer be doubted or debated. Despite the voluminous evidence that senior Bush administration officials authorized torture, the only people who have been held accountable for this maltreatment of prisoners are low-ranking soldiers. President Obama has said that no one is above the law, and Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the Department of Justice will follow the facts wherever they lead. It's time to hold them to their word.

Until the guilty parties are held accountable and justice is done, the government will just get more and more closed and corrupt. Obama, if he is not making it better, is making it worse. This political system tends gradually toward an imperial presidency.

Although he has not been intelligent, resourceful, cunning, or creative enough to find a way to close Guantanamo Bay, President Obama has sought to leave some avenues open for future action. The indefinite detention of people without charge or trial is a gross violation of human rights under the US Constitution as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unconventional solutions are better than the status quo. If they cannot be returned to their home countries, airdrop them back into the rural Afghanistan where they were found, or Iraq, or Turkmenistan, or tag them and release them in Guam, the Antarctic Research Station, Brunei, or somewhere. Obama must be afraid of the political costs of freeing illegally held people.

WTF Breakout?

Marc Maron's WTF popped up as a number 7 of the top 10 funny things(?) of the year in Rolling Stone and is the subject of an article in The New York Times. This is in addition to the minor appearances in other places such as Jewcy and Re:Comedy. The slideshow at the NYT has a few new pictures, too. I knew WTF was getting more listeners, but I'm a little surprised to hear Brendan McDonald say 200,000. It still feels like there are 200 or 2,000 of us listening.

Post-human Cyber-remains

The New York Times has a lengthy and interesting article by Rob Walker discussing digital immortality (or whatever you want to call it). Much of the article revolves around the late Mac Tonnies and his Posthuman Blues blog. Maybe you should download the article to your computer; you never know when The New York Times will suddenly disappear completely. The article include links to tribute sites Mac-Bots and Post-Mac Blues. According to one item in the article, the possibility of a real Mac-Bot is getting closer:

Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, “a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends.” This information is meant to be filtered through an “interactive avatar,” modeled on you, “that becomes more intelligent as you add more information.” The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company’s tag line is “Eternalize.” VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. “We want to give users the gift of immortality,” an Intellitar founder has said.

Type it with IPA symbols online

Away from home and can't find the right characters on your keyboard? Typeit let's you type Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, the Intenational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols needed for English, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Symbols, Turkish, Welsh, and international currency symbols on any computer. According to the website,

Recommended IPA fonts available on various platforms:

• Windows XP: Lucida Sans Unicode
• Windows Vista: Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
• Windows 7: Calibri, Cambria, Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
• Mac OS: Lucida Grande

To those we can also add Charis, DejaVu Sans, Doulos SIL, Gentium, Linux Libertine, Monotype, and Tahoma, among others. IPA input methods differ by platform, but for Linux you can just copy useful characters into your Character Palette for a click-and-paste method of typing. If you have it installed and added to the panel, just right-click it to edit it.

Statistical Handbook of Japan

If you are interested in Japan and numerate (numerically literate?), you may want to read the newest statistical digest. This book may also be available at the government printing office bookstore in Otemachi (if it's still there) or in bookstores, but you can view it online or download each chapter separately (in English) in pdf form from the website:
http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/index.htm

The Chaos

The Chaos
by Gerard Nolst Trenité - (1922)

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From "desire": desirable-admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.

Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?

Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.

Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
You'll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.

Would you like some more? You'll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
Does not sound like Czech but ache.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.

Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,

Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,

Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",
But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.

Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper, some and home.

"Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker",
Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor",
Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.

Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.

Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.

Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,
Valentine and magazine.

And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.

Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,

Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.
Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.

Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;
Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.

Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)

Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don't mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did,
Funny rhymes to unicorn,
Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.

No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud
Is no better than McLeod.

But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.

Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you're not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.

Please don't monkey with the geyser,
Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.

Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan.

The th will surely trouble you
More than r, ch or w.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.

Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget 'em-
Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.

The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight-you see it;
With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.

Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,

Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.

Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry.

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!

Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess-it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.

Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.

Mind the o of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;
Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.

Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.
Liable, but Parliament.

Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.

A of valour, vapid vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
I of antichrist and grist,

Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll.

Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won't it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying "grits"?

It's a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!


Sources:
http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php

(or, an earlier unattributed publication of the poem accompanied with the Cut Spelling alternate orthography)
http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j3/chaos.php

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/vangogh/555/Spell/chaos.html

NYT Interactive Budget Puzzle

It really isn't so hard to balance the US budget and eliminate the deficit. That was my go at it. You don't need to go back to the policies of the Eisenhower administration or even the Clinton administration. I think the hard part comes in when you have to convince 100 Senators and 438 Congresspeople to vote for your plan. Perhaps it's also a problem that there is no single person to come up with a budget and push it through (as far as I know, it's a committee thing).

Give it a try, if you haven't done so already.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

Results as tabulated in late November. The comments people made in the related article "16 Ways to Cut the Deficit" also reveal a lot more common sense than you usually hear from politicians and the illiterate man-in-the-street.

xtrs

This is your TRS-80 -- emulator... in the Ubuntu Software Store. I haven't installed it. Don't worry--apparently, if you haven't got a cassette deck storage unit attached to your computer, you can store the programs that you write as .WAV files.

MacDaemon

Mac OS X
--not just Cupertino BS--
Cupertino BSD

December 4 variation:

Fixing the iPod Shuffle to act more like a proper USB mass storage audio player

Manythings.org/shuffle/ has a good explanation of how to fix the iPod Shuffle. It links directly to the sourceforge page of rebuild_db. It also explains why any reasonable person --such as a language student-- might find it useful to rebuild the database. I wish I had known about this sooner.

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.