Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Admittedly, it’s been out of control for quite some time. It is good that we get to see other people realizing how crazy these guys are. People say it’s not about control and protecting a dead profit model, but what else can it be? It is not about helping artists,
not about making money. It’s just a cold-hearted attack on customers and could-be customers.

I think that the labels are probably not as bad as the organisation that is representing them. Surely not all of them are “rootkit Sony” out to shut down legitimate computer users? I would hate to think that these actions by the RIAA are really representative of the music industry. These guys have got to be the worst of the worst.

I finally got around to trying to play video on my zaurus. It’s an old 5500 model, and I’ve been playing audio-only on it for quite a while. It’s been little more than an overpriced 512MB audio player since I got my Blackberry, so I started thinking about what I can do with it.

Well, it would probably be okay but it does few formats (no avi) and frame rate is not at all impressive. It pretty quickly falls behind or runs ahead and you’re stuck trying to mentally fit the sounds and video together post-facto. Also, about 1/2 hour runs the battery about 1/2 capacity, even with the backlight set as low as possible without being “off”.

Still a nice MP3 player. Does have some games and an encrypted password manager, so it’s not useless. I guess time is just catching up to it. You can’t stay hot and new forever.

OLPC has been renamed. Welcome the CM1.

I can’t say the name of .. .umm that scifi religion thing that a number of hollywood stars are into, because if I do, they might sue my ISP (or me personally) for copyright or trademark infringement . Okay, rremember to never mention these guys publically. I guess whatever stifles public criticism has got to look good to those folks.

Be very afraid. Besides seeming kooky, they’re now seeming pretty spooky.

Firefox reached 200 million (read that again) downloads in addition to who-knows-how-many installs through other agencies and shares on disk. In fact, I doubt that it counts the firefox copies shared via ubuntu and debian repositories (a HUGE source of activity) and installs from live CDs (you’d be surprised how many). So Firefox is a major, major player.

As a result, some people planned a crazy event to celebrate. I think it’s cool.

No, there is too much Let me sum up…

It’s about who “owns” the internet and can charge for access, or for “preferred” access.

Nobody owns the internet. Everyone is a participant. If someone starts charging for special access, I hope all their local competitors (wifi included) will eat their lunch. The internet needs to be a free and open bazaar. It doesn’t need to be owned by a corporation.

How odd. I guess you have to make sure that you have pre-tested your educational ideas on some other country before you try to give laptops to India.

I recommend we start at my neighborhood. There are lots of children, and we can keep them in free laptops for a few years and then measure the “damage” done.

Tim

Okay, it seems that my problem is that the wireless key is not being set. What I can do is ifup ath0=office and then in a new terminal do iwconfig ath0 key=AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDDEEEEEF (not the real key) and I get connected very quickly and very well.

What confuses me is that the key I use in the iwconfig statement is the very same key in the /etc/network/interfaces file, and typically I will cat the file so I can highlight and use the key. In that file it is listed (with data changed to protect my employer) as:

iface office inet dhcp
    wireless-essid the-work-wireless
    wireless-key AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDDEEEEEF

Now, if the same key that’s in the file works, I must have screwed up the syntax in the file or something, no? Not sure why this doesn’t work, but when I find out I will leave my dumb screwup here so other people can find out what I’ve done wrong. Sometimes the best service we can provide is to be a warning to others.

Nice. HP is good enough to offer more support for Debian.

In case you’re ever bothered by that annoying carefree, safe feeling, I have just the cure for you. Spend a few hours at Risks Digest reading about threats to privacy. Then pop over to Chilling Effects and read about how freedoms are abused to chill innovation and free speech. When you’re feeling pretty agitated, try stopping by EFF.org’s Action page to see what can be done and what kinds of actions are taking place even as you go about your happy life.

See? Now you feel much more paranoid and can bask in the light of your righteous indignation.

I have been reading recent article about the movie “Brasil” and how that dystopia applies to our world. I thought it was a pretty interesting perspective on a depressing film.

My buddy Glen loves that film. It’s funny in a dark way, and you have to be alert (it doesn’t have a laugh track to alert the dull-witted that there’s something funny going on). There are a few scenes in particular that resonate with life in America’s large corporations (unfortunately).

Tonight my friends (Fred and Donna) took me and the wife to Music In The Loft in Chicago to see Howard Levy and Anthony Molinaro. I am beyond impressed. These are two true musicians. The mood was casual, the room was packed, and the performance was brilliant. I will never look at a harmonica the same way again.

I’m once again conflicted 1/2 wanting to learn and see how far I can go, and 1/2 wanting to burn all my music gear because I’ll never reach the level of these guys.

Levy is nothing short of amazing. When he did his solo, “Amazing Grace”, the whole room was fascinated and stirred. Of course, it’s a beloved and classic hymn, but Howard L showcased harmonica technique that we would never have considered possible. How does a guy accompany himself in two parts (or more?) on a harmonica?

Anthony Molinaro was no slouch. He has truly amazing depth and technique.

I don’t have much more I can say, it’s really more than I can express. It’s midnight, and I’m exhausted, but I wanted to mentoin that I got to see this amazing duo tonight.

Okay, I’m pretty tired, and have been away from home too long. I’m probably not emotionally 100% here, and I’m a little short on brain power, but do you know why java stinks? Besides the tedious syntax, I mean?

Because someone in the java world decided that configuration is a really cool idea and so we should get to do a lot of it. I’ve installed a lot of python and C and C++ on a lot of linux and windows boxes. I’ve *used* (but not installed) them on Unix systems. It’s always a breeze.

I install python in debian: apt-get install python and it just works. I install ruby apt-get install ruby and it just works. Likewise squeak smalltalk, awk, bash, and just about anything else you might like.

Java? No, that one is a stinker. Now I have to set a bunch of environment variables to configure the java to run on my system. Admittedly, it would be cool if the installer would do that for me (and I blame them for it). But having never worked with java, I’m not sure which variables to set, or to what. Do I point to a jar, a directory that contains jars, a directory that has directories named ‘bin’ and ‘lib’? Which one? Do I set them for all users, or just the server userid or just for me? Do I point to the JRE or the JDK?

And by the way, how do I know which directory is which? A friend at TFUG suggested dpkg -l was the ticket to find out what was installed by apt. Good point. I should learn to use dpkg directly, not just apt-get, apt-cache, and synaptic. I am happy that these tools do the hard work from me, but now that Java has intruded into my life I need to be able to get more detailed information about my configuration.

Well, when you don’t know much about java and don’t know much about sys admin, then it’s hard to know how to configure java. I guess I should just be prepared for installing java to be a configuration burden. I fear that java will be like a really bad girlfriend, in the way that python is like a really nice girlfriend. I figure that my java relationship is probably going to be all about java’s needs. I’ll be spending my time and money trying to make Java happy, and she won’t appreciate me at all in the long run.

Man am I glad I married a great girlfriend and not a high-maintenance nightmare. But back to programming languages and installs…

I have run Eclipse on my machine, and JUnit, and FitNesse, so I figured that Java was set up pretty well. That is until I got my hands on tomcat. Now apparently my java setup isn’t good enough. It has to be different for tomcat than for eclipse, I guess. What’s worse than a high maintenance girlfriend? Two of them, I guess.

Mind you, I’m not a java professional who is installing this Java and tomcat stuff so that I can run my whizzo professional Java apps. I am a noob who is doing this so that I can start to learn about java application development. I know a little syntax, and once spent a few weeks trying to write Java code, and that’s about all I know. I need a playground in which to start learning about web apps and Java.

Maybe I’ve learned the first thing that a java programmer needs to know: it’s a cumbersome bureaucracy and you have to ask permission and meet java’s expectations before you are allowed to do anything. It’s so not python, and so not ruby.

From docs, it looks like the same Java geniuses who decided that we should have to configure each java user’s environment variables were let loose on the application itself. This stuff is all driven by xml files and environment variables and the like. I bet it’s going to make it all rahter hard to test.
It’s bad enough to have to learn java, without having to learn a lot of xml file formats and configuration minutae. Can someone tell me how this ever got to be popular?

Again, it’s nearly midnight (and I’ve seen a lot of midnights lately) and I’m probably just too tired to be trying to configure anything. Or to be blogging for that matter. I just needed to rant a little.

Beam music had their latest goodies from Washburn today.

I tried some solidbody models, I think a W-something and an X-something. They were nice, and the one with Duncans had a good, balanced, rich sound. I really did like them, but I guess I’m not as interested in electric guitars today.

I’ll tell you why: I bought a set of Seymour Duncan passive humbucker pickups, a Jazz SH-2n and a JB (the hot-rodded humbucker set) and I’m about to get them installed in my Ovation Breadwinner, which I think I’ve mentioned before. I’m still in love with that weird guitar and it’s wonderful neck, and I am all excited about the prospect of hearing it sing out in a really warm, rich voice. I wish I could do that for myself. I don’t want to build it up too much, because I don’t want to be disappointed, but I’m not as interested in other solidbodies right now.

That being said, the washburn Idol and W series are seriously beautiful guitars. They are as much sculpture and art as they are instruments. I’m completely sold on the glossy, transparent color finishes. These things are as gorgeous as they come.

The X series one was strat-shaped with two humbuckers. I liked the “tone” (contour) control. I think Washburn is on to something here. I’d rather choose some point in the gradient between humbucker and single-coil sound rather than crank tone up and down. What a neat toy.

I finally tried the HB30 and HB32 hollowbodies. I could have spent the whole evening. The first thing I noticed is that these were no plywood juggernauts, these were tonewood, and thin enough to be resonant and “live” you could feel it even before strumming. Each felt a bit like a really good vintage gibson acoustic, only a little thicker. I tried the pickups together and separately, twiddled knobs, tried them with high and low gain, and generally played around with each. I spent more than 1/2 of the trip playing with these.

I’ve been enamored of the HB32 with the natural wood and distressed hardware. I did get a little nervous when I picked it up. I was afraid that it was a “gimmick” guitar, and would be all novel design and nothing else. I actually liked it. It’s novel, to be sure, but it played well. I would keep one.

I then picked up the HB30, and was surprised that I liked it even more. The neck is glossy, not satin like the ‘32, and I’m not into glossy, but the guitar felt and sounded great. I could see settling in with this one, too.

Scott Adams has it right this time though he didn’t mention that the sound effects and music are five times louder than anything else. So you turn up the tube to hear the dialog (as such) and you finally get comfy until an actor drops a spoon, which will sound like an oil pipeline dropped from the space shuttle landing on a tin roof. And then the violins will start, sounding like a fleet of bombers overhead.

He’s right about movies seeming to spend all their time making you feel bad. I watched some 12 tv last night and was disgusted with how each of them is mean-spirited (either the characters, the producer, the writer, or all of the above) and wanted to make you feel as if you’d been abused and were in physical danger. I guess that’s “impact”. I guess all the “important” movies are the ones that have “raw impact” — sort of like the way a crater hits the planet. On the other hand, I am an odd character and tend to turn to TV either for something called “information” or something called “entertainment”. If I wanted to be ‘impacted’ I would go lay down in traffic. I don’t want to suffer for their art, I want to be entertained by it. I would prefer a blockbuster to an “important” movie anyday because I would rather leave the theater entertained than impacted. And yes, the worse it makes you feel, the longer it is. I guess we’re supposed to pay once at the box office, and once again in the seats.

Someone was asking about this, and I had to find a quote that stated that java was created for consumer electronics. Now you know it too.

It looks like windows isn’t all that great. Of course, we knew that all along. Most people who like windows have never tried anything else. It doesn’t take much, and it doesn’t take long, to realize that it’s a mess.

I’m told that the techies there are wonderful, but the organization is not a good technology management organization. I bet someone up there is going to argue that they’re not evil enough.

It is good to know that the law of deserving consequences held: time wounds all heels.