Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Though it’s all over the web, I thought it might be nice to make mention of the Desktop Linux State of the Union address. It’s been a good year. Even if Aunt Millie doesn’t want to use XUbuntu just yet (maybe with XFCE 4.4, just out) she’d be more likely to use it now than in 2004 or even 2005. The industry/community has been doing an incredible job.

I was reading a post on a news group about which distribution to choose for “Grandma Millie”. I figure I’m probably 20 years older than the poster, so his grandma might be my aunt. Aunt Millie, in my imagination, is a lady who is fairly modern (heh: thoroughly modern?). She probably plays music and surfs the web. She does email and word processing, might keep a list or two in spreadsheets. She likely plays solitaire and some puzzle games (though perhaps when nobody is looking she breaks out Doom). She doesn’t program, isn’t a sysadmin, wouldn’t know what to make of any of the files in /etc/ let alone those in /var/log. She doesn’t know how to combat virii and spyware. She wants things to “just work”.

A few years ago, Aunt Millie would be better off either using a pre-packaged distro with online support, or else not bothering. This year, she’s probably best off with OS X still, but there are distros that might work. I’m trying to decide why she wouldn’t like mine.

I run XUbuntu (Edgy Eft), which is XFCE4 over Ubuntu. It is as trouble-free a distribution as any I’ve used. If I had let it take over my whole disk and do as it pleased, I would have skipped some troubles, and generally I am the cause of most of my problems. I think it’s pretty close to being great for Aunt Millie.

There is a panel and a menu and nice themes. I don’t think that Millie needs to live under an illusion that she’s running MS Windows. She’s not an idiot and she would just be frustrated with an “almost windows” that failed her in little details. Making Linux look like Linux isn’t an embarrassment. Gnome, KDE, XFCE are all very nice looking. She won’t die because they’re not just like Windows. Frankly, the idea that

XFCE4 is good stuff. I love its stability and small size. It leaves me a lot of CPU and RAM. Aunt Millie’s computer is a little old and a little underpowered, and could in no way run Vista, but XUbuntu would probably run very happily. After her Windows experience, she will probably be happy with a system that can run more than 7 applications at a time without slowing to a crawl or crashing. After her virus experience, just running virus-free will feel incredibly fast.

If I go over to Millie’s house and set her up, I think she would be able to do most tasks. Automatic hardware detection does almost everything you need these days. She might need some help with the printer setup and maybe wireless. But I’ve gotten better with those, as they’ve gotten easier. I couldn’t do either by hand (I am not good at knowing which drivers to use, and you *dont* want me modding your kernel) but the Linux world has come along. OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other native linux apps will handle the bulk of her day-to-day needs. There are great multimedia apps, podcatchers,

However, Microsoft’s ubiquity is a problem because too many companies have been convinced that they should only target Microsoft users. Millie will want her shockwave web sites, but there is no shockwave for Linux. Millie might want to keep her printer, but it may be a WinPrinter (manufactured purely for Windows use), as well as her modem (Millie needs cable). Millie’s digital camera or camcorder (when she buys it) will come with a support CD for Windows only, or maybe windows and Mac. It will probably work just fine with Linux right out of the box, but she’ll have to try it to find out; the manufacturer won’t tell her. And then there are those fun web sites that are only compatible with Windows and IE. Actually, they might work fine with Firefox under Linux but the people who wrote the web site decided to check for that browser and that OS and refuse any non-MS systems. And then it is a little harder to do Windows Desktop Sharing and the like from Linux.

Aunt Millie will try to download software willy-nilly from web sites. That’s how she got all those viruses to begin with. She will click a link in an email with 14 “fwd”s. And when that software comes down in an msi or exe and won’t install, poor Aunt Millie may have un-lady-like words to say. She can easily learn to use Synaptic to install any of several thousand software packages available to her, but those stupid web pages will still have their allure.

Finally there is the problem that Auntie is employed, and sometimes needs to bring home work. She can get by fine with OpenOffice, but how does she handle QuickBooks? What if she’s the one collared to run Dreamweaver and fix up the company web pages, or maybe they’ve dictated that she needs to use (gah!) FrontPage or Publisher. There are far better html editing environments in the open source world, but you can’t beat a company mandate. Should Millie have a separate Windows machine just for working from home?

When wine is brain-dead easy to use, maybe Millie will have a chance. If she has to buy a separate copy of Windows and run Xen or Parallels, it’s unlikely she’ll be happy. There’s a much smaller advantage to open source if you also have to have a full copy of a closed-source operating system and tools in order to use it. Millie needs the rest of the world to embrace the idea that it’s not a one-horse race. Its not, you know.

See, they just keep adding features. I saw just today that we now have tabs as well as horizontal and vertical window tiles in VIM. Is that crazy or what? I opened a console and typed:

vim -p *.txt

Sure enough — six tabs, one file in each. I’m not calling it a breakthrough, but it’s kinda handy. I can also use :tabf filename to load a file in a new tab.

I might use screen a little less (though vim won’t allow me to detach and reattach later).

I remember in the old days when we I learned to use submit and later supersub to do modest programming in CP/M. It was such a great improvement in the CP/M and small OS (TRS-DOS, etc) landscape. I doubt I could copy a file in CP/M now, but I remember that we used the command line because it was the way things were done. There wasn’t a lot of choice.

I moved into dos and even when I had a nice graphical interface (PC-GEOS, Windows, etc) I found that I often used it to open multiple command line windows and text editors. I used to write BASIC programs and dos BAT files to make the basic files work (install, etc). I used command lines for version control, I used them for file copying, and there was always utility there. I even put out some of my own money for tools like 4Dos, which had a much better command line experience than microsoft had ever considered. It was a pretty hot app in the day.

A little later I moved full-time to Unix and was amazed at the power in the Korn shell, C shell, and the like. I eventually settled into Bash after much flirting with alternatives. It’s actually a pretty decent programming environment, though it’s an untyped and ad-hoc “language”. It’s the ability to string cool tools together, the command-line recall and editing, the ability to define functions and command files (bash scripts) and the rest that makes it powerful and useful.

Every time I’ve had to drop back into a version of Windows or OS/2, I always felt hobbled by the lack of a powerful command line tool that would stand toe-to-toe with Bash, but it was never to be. I was told by the popular press that command line interfaces are weak, and lame, and useless, and passe. The cool kids use graphical file managers where they click with a mouse instead of typing with their nine good fingers (and that left thumb nobody uses…?). Somehow it was supposed to be faster, but it never turned out that way. There were even announcements that the next release of windows (or the next release after that) would not even have a command-line tool at all. People touted that idea as if it were the ultimate improvement in operating system philosophy.

When windows users complain about how horrible command lines are, we point them to a better command line. Bash is as far beyond dos command.com as Python is beyond original BASIC. It’s that command-line interfaces are a bad category, it’s just that they’ve only experienced the lamest entry in the catalog. Some of them can be convinced , but to many “command.com” must be the best, because Microsoft makes it. It’s as annoying an attitude as the opposite (everything M$ makes is evil).

Meanwhile sh, bash, zsh, and their ilk gain all new popularity with the Linux crowd, and with MSys and Cygwin and commercial MKS tool even the windows users find themselves stringing together filters and learning the so-called “black art” of simple shell programming.

Now there is a change in public opinion about command lines. Did it come from the Linux and Unix users? From the sudden popularity of Mac OS X? From the DOS people using MKS/MSys/Cygwin? Was it a growing realization that command lines are really useful? Was it a hunger for a command.com replacement that could stand toe-to-toe against the better version in competing operating systems? No. People are beginning to think it’s cool because microsoft released a new command-line interpreter. I guess to many people, if MS does it it’s a good thing.

Now, EWeek was impressed because you can tell the directory to sort by size. I guess they really didn’t pay much attention to the ls manual page, because LS has been able to sort by size, name, age, or anything else you like, in ascending or descending order.

Either way, I am glad to see our Redmond friends realizing that a good command line interface is a good thing, just like a poor command line interface is a bad thing. At least there is some agreement that it isn’t a quaint old idea that needs to be extinguished. It’s just amazing how much announcements from Redmond shape public opinion.

Color me frustrated. I guess this is how the old Smalltalk guys feel all the time.

It’s another instance in the long lines of patent abuse by unjust, wealthy, and greedy corporation. This time it’s an academic product called BlueJ being copied with an attempt at patenting.

I know, to anthropomorphize an organization is a little iffy. Microsoft isn’t a person with a person’s motivations and complications. It is an organization composed of many thousands of people, some of which have excellent character and motivations, others not so much. It may be (as the blueJ article states) that the people filing for the patent have no idea that the “innovation” wasn’t locally-invented. But the law treats microsoft as an individual (that whole legal fiction being useful in many contexts), so I guess they get the benefits along with the liabilities. I think that corporations do have personalities, and that sometimes the people working in them don’t share all those traits.

It’s the patenting that is the problem. I consider the idea that you can own an idea to be pretty stupid anyway, and software patents in particular. For the vole to copy BlueJ features is okay as far as I am concerned, especially if the built it from the ground-up (rather than copying source). What’s wrong is for them to copy it and then steal ownership from the original source via the patent mechanism.

The conversation that grew out of the above post included a reference to the famous “Stacker” case, and I provide a link here for the curious.

This is just a link blog, but it’s interesting what these guys have to say about software development, and game development in particular. They even explain what it is that makes games fun. This is worth a read if you’re a programmer of any sort.

Vista may not be able to play your music and video as detailed by an article from Polish Linux. There is a good description of DRM and so-called trusted computing (meaning that the RIAA and MPAA can trust you, not that you can trust your computer). More is also present on the double-talking PlaysForSure and FairPlay systems. Any windows user should read through this article and determine how much they want to “trust” these systems.

By the way, the VideoLan Client (vlc) for windows seems very good. I have friends using it quite happily. You might check it out.

According to Ars Technica article there is now a fifth big label. Say hello to “Merlin”, which is really an association of the “independent labels” (an oxymoronic term, perhaps). The exciting thing is that they’re much more interested in building a fan base than in fighting potential piracy. Distributing unrestricted MP3 files is considered a good thing.

Caldas has already inked a deal […] that will provide an easy way for independent artists to sell their music on MySpace or to construct their own stores elsewhere. Under the deal, SNOCAP will provide all the backend distribution and payment processing systems and will serve files as unprotected MP3s. Independent labels have been open to selling music without DRM for years (eMusic, the number two download store in the US, offers only MP3s from independent bands), as many artists are more concerned with building a fan base than with possible piracy

Apparently the venture capitalists are seeing the future in digital music companies. It would take a dense person indeed to not notice the plethora of portable music players and online music stores, let alone the p2p trading sites. Anyone who listens to podcasts knows about podsafe music and a number of independent bands who make their music available for download as a way of selling merchandise. You can’t read any music news without realizing that iTunes and eMusic and the like are big business. You might not have heard of some of the others, like Magnatune (evil-free) music service, but you have to be aware that such things exist.

If the VCs are pumping their cash into digital music, maybe the business will continue to strengthen. That would be good because we need more political power in the device vendors and the independent labels. We’ll need enough back-pressure to resist the Big4’s attempts to legislate digital music as-we-know-it out of existence. If the device manufacturers can gather some “umph” then maybe they can fight against stupid DRM schemes. But then again, the VCs could start to sink their money into DRM schemes, which would be a waste of their money and a lot of thrash and legal maneuvering.

The Rehearsals.com idea is cool. The way I read it, it is about connecting fans and artists in a cool way. I think that kind of idea is welcome by both sides, provided the business model is fair and affordable.

I like the way the industry (not the Big 4) is moving.

BTW: I read that Virgin/Columbia is going through a tough time and that there are a lot of layoffs coming. I just hope that some of the people who are “released” will find healthy and gainful employment outside of Big 4 space, maybe even creating new companies which understand the music business and can make use of the technologies and talents that exist outside Big 4 legal space. With that much talent being released in the wild, almost anything could happen. Ex-Virgin Music people: I wish you well and expect to hear good things from you in the coming years.

People still seem to think that the whole world is a windows machine running IE. Here’s my latest “loser cap” from AOL Video:

I guess it takes up less space than my translation:

“Oh, I’m sorry mister Linux computer user, but I was told by Microsoft that linux users don’t really exist in the world, that Linux is just an evil marketing campaign from that meanie IBM to hurt beloved, poor ole’ Bill. You just go away.”

Okay, maybe that’s just how it read to me, but I got the message. I’m not welcome there.

Okay, it was my fault. The symptoms were certainly confusing, though.

I could not run bash shell scripts. It was maddening, because I normally run several. If I put “bash scriptname” it worked, but “./scriptname” would not run. It would argue about not having permissions, but I checked permissions and ownership and the shebang line and all, and it would just not work. I was badly confused, and my TFUG friends tried to help, but it was not obvious.

Likewise, I was having trouble with my eclipse install. I had tried purging and then reinstalling, dropping the .eclipse directory, all kinds of remedies, but the errors remained pretty confusing all along. I finally got enough trouble out of the way that I saw that I was getting a mmap permissions error.

The thing that had changed most recently was my playing with partitions. The partition I had mounted at /data was tiny, /home was tiny, and I had this great big Windows partition sitting around unused. Easy answer: nuke windows. I put ext3 on the windows partition and moved /home there. Now there’s plenty of space on / and /home. I used cp -rp so permissions should not have changed, and all looked fine. Then I took the old /home and moved the /data over to it. That tripled the space I had in the /data area. The remainder I put into swap, just in case.

So it is logical that any bizarre problems I have left would be as a result of the movement of files and the new partition mounting. So I finally take a look at my /etc/fstab.

In programming, I rant against cut-n-paste programming for just this kind of reason. I’d copied a line, and the line I copied had the options “defaults,users”. Users? Why in the world would I have that option for /home? It didn’t even make sense. I dropped that from the fstab and remounted /home. Not entirely surprisingly, I can execute bash shells just like in the good old days (last week) and I can run eclipse again. Apparently the “users” option has ugly side-effects so that mmap APIs cannot work, failing with a permissions error.

If you want to see how frustrating it is, go add the “users” to your mount options for /home and play around with it. You’d be surprised how often that mmap comes into play, and specifically who does it.

Now I have a rock-solid Ubuntu system again and all my tools and toys work just fine. I’m happy, and have learned my lesson.

I read now that the labels are starting to rethink their DRM stance. This has been good for independents:

Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales.

It is good for device manufacturers:

“We could release our products without digital-rights management restrictions on them in the way that consumers want and still make a lot of money,” Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, said at Midem over the weekend. “And I think we’ll be hearing more and more about that.”

Amazingly, though, there are people vested in the old DRM ideal. This quote seems moronic to me:

The judge said a consumer’s right to make private copies does not extend to letting subscribers store songs broadcast by XM. “‘Fair use’ does not extend them that right to become distributors of music,” Bainwol said at Midem.

How is storing music equivalent to distributing it? I don’t see the connection. It’s like equating ripping a CD to stealing a car or shoplifting. It’s nonsense. If someone stores a song then they are capable of distributing it, but that’s not the same as doing it. I think it’s insane to talk about punishing a person for being capable of crime, instead of for committing a crime. This is my argument with DMCA. There should be no “illegal state of being”, wherein one is a criminal by virtue of being crime-capable. Being able to bypass protection shouldn’t be illegal. Bypassing it should not be illegal. Distributing (assumption: for profit) should certainly be. Copying to your iPod should not be. Time-shifting, format-shifting, device-shifting are not wrong, and fair use should certainly allow for it.

Equally stupid is this quote:

In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. “We’re for interoperability,” he said, “and there’s nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability.”

Certainly there is something intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability. The whole point of DRM is to prevent unauthorized playing on unauthorized devices. DRM by its very nature and intent is an intrinsic anti-interoperability mechanism. That means you can only interoperate with approved devices, and that means only those devices and programs whose makers can pay licensing fees and implement the top-secret, DMCA-protected copy protection can interoperate. No open source projects, no free players, no non-paying devices.

Just splitting hairs: due to the DMCA owning the source to the DRM software puts you in an illegal state of being capable of bypassing the copy protection. If you think about it, building a DRM system should be illegal under DMCA. Only DRM-free players playing DRM-free files would be safe and legal?

I was reading The Barbarian Way and was amused by the names for various groups of animals.

• A murder of crows
• A charge of rhinos
• An ambush of tigers
• A crash of hippopotami

I realized that we needed more of these descriptive names for small social groups, and so I offer the following:

• A giggle of girls
• A stumble of boys

You can find more fun collective nouns at rinkworks.

Wooot! The problem was entirely in the mount options in my fstab. For some inexplicable reason I had “defaults,users” even though there is no desire that users have the ability to mount and unmount /home! That caused some ripples, and I couldn’t run bash scripts normally, and mmap failed on objects in the /home partition. It was ugly, and confusing. When I changed the /etc/fstab, to use “defaults” instead and remounted, all problems vanished. Live is good, eclipse works, bash works. All is well. I bet that error is unique to me.

I can’t run Eclipse. I’m not sure how this happened, but it was in the course of redoing partitions, oddly enough.
I got rid of my windows partition, and moved /home there in order to get about double the space for my files, then I got rid of my /data by moving it to the much larger part where /home used to live. I also made a single swap part (oddly enough there were two).

As a result, it seems that hibernate doesn’t work (a Linux problem I don’t yet know how to fix) so I just use the suspend, and also eclipse wont load. Every other app works just fine. I install eclipse via APT tools using XUbuntu’s repositories.

As a brute-force remediation, I marked all the eclipse tools for reinstall, and nothing got better. I was frustrated.

I figured that a fresh install of eclipse would probably install correctly, so I need my system to be free. I removed all the packages for eclipse via the APT system. Then I found all vestiges of eclipse and wiped them out, including /usr/{share,lib,bin}/eclipse* and ~/.eclipse stuff. I made sure it was gone. As far as I could tell, there was no sign that eclipse had ever been on my machine. Now for that fresh install — I went to apt and had it install eclipse. Strangely enough, i didn’t get a startup.jar and it looks like other things were missing. I removed, cleaned, autocleaned, and reinstalled a few times and then I got my startup. Looks like some part of the solver was confused about what I had and didn’t have. I don’t know why.

I now have a different set of error messages. They start like this:

!SESSION 2007-01-23 20:28:57.180 ———————————————–
eclipse.buildId=M20060921-0945
java.version=1.5.0_08
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=linux, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=en_US
Framework arguments: –initialize
Command-line arguments: -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86 –initialize

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: initializer_error in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_fileNotFound in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_IOError in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_missingFileName in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2007-01-23 20:29:00.374
!MESSAGE An error occurred while automatically activating bundle org.eclipse.ui.workbench (103).
!STACK 0
org.osgi.framework.BundleException: The activator org.eclipse.ui.internal.WorkbenchPlugin for bundle org.eclipse.ui.workbench is invalid
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.loadBundleActivator(AbstractBundle.java:141)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleContextImpl.start(BundleContextImpl.java:962)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleHost.startWorker(BundleHost.java:317)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.start(AbstractBundle.java:256)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseLazyStarter.preFindLocalClass(EclipseLazyStarter.java:86)
at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findLocalClass(ClasspathManager.java:409)
at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.findLocalClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:188)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findLocalClass(BundleLoader.java:334)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.SingleSourcePackage.loadClass(SingleSourcePackage.java:37)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:383)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:347)
at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.loadClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:83)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)
(yadda yadda yadda)

The stack trace goes on and on. Since I’m not really a java developer (yet) and not familiar with eclipse internals or structure (I’ve only used it as a pedestrian noob) I have no idea what it’s looking for. All I know is that it does not work. I suppose I’ll be back to long google searches and the wild goose chases that entails. It would help if I knew what I was doing with eclipse, but it will be more magic incantations (try this… does that work? No? Oh, then undo it and try *this*).

It seems that one of the worst features of java apps is their extreme sensitivity to setup issues and their inability to help resolve them. I was a happy eclipse user one day, the next day eclipse and hibernate don’t work, but all of the other apps on my system are completely happy and sane. I lost nothing but Eclipse, but I really need that to work now.

I guess that Java is a little slice of hell, and to work there you have to learn a lot of things you don’t want to know.

My friend Brandon (Boris) sent me a link to a Computer Chronicles episode from 1985 that asked a crazy question. The question is “will Unix become the next MS-DOS?”

They suggested that Unix might become the operating system of the future. That future, of course, is now. We are finding Unix-like programs (BSD, Linux, AIX, Mac OS X, etc) on desktops all over the country and all over the world. How many? Nobody can tell. It’s notoriously hard to count copies of free software. In addition, we’re finding Linux on IBM mainframes, Point-of-sale systems everywhere from McDonald’s to Burlington Coat Factory and AutoZone, and on mobile phones and media players. Most of our routers and cable modems are running some kind of Linux, and perhaps we are interacting with some kind of Unix many times per day. Of course, the phone switching systems have been based on one kind of Unix or another for a very long time. You probably interact with some kind of Unix system several times a day, and at least a few dozen times a week.

They listed the portability of Linux as a major feature. They’re right. Being able to play on desktops is a good thing (and Linux certainly does), but also being able to run headless (no GUI) on servers is a very powerful feature. If it can be moved across chips and architectures then it can be put on devices where people don’t even know there is a computer, let alone an operating system. This is true for the telephone switching system and various consumer electronics.

In the 1985 episode, they didn’t talk much about the X Window System, so they couldn’t know about KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or Enlightenment. They didn’t know how far we could come in 20 years, and who can blame them. They did hypothesize about a Mac look-alike interface on top of Unix, never dreaming that Mac would eventually be a form of unix!

It’s funny now that the main reason Bill Joy gave for Unix not to spread is that it lacked a program like Lotus 1-2-3. Of course, now the remaining barriers seem to be 1) it’s not preloaded, and 2) there are cool Windows games. As virtualization and marketing continue, we will see these things eroding, and indeed they may not be that important anyway. Everything I need to do I can do in Linux. My family is converted to Non-MS and has been for some time, and the only complaints I hear is that we can’t play City of Heroes (yet). I will learn about emulators and the like, and I bet we’ll be doing that before too long.

As the last word, they have a fellow telling how Unix portability is a myth (not so now) how incompatible the versions are (heh) and how user-hostile the system is. Hmmm… I think those arguments are pretty much dead now, though the odd microschill might try to dredge it up now and then.

It’s a fun video. You should give it a play, and remember they’re talking about Unix 20 years ago, before Linux popularized it in the public eye.

One nice thing about Chicago is the tech companies up here. There are a lot of good employers, though all jobs have their problems. I’m impressed by the number of Linux-based phones put out by Motorola. I was over at Tux Mobil and saw the very impressive Linux phones offered by Motorola. When it’s time to trade phones, I will probably be looking at these. If you have to support SOME operating system, might as well support one you believe in.

Okay, my sense of humor is not your sense of humor maybe, but I find the decss gallery one of the funniest things going. I particularly like the dramatic reading by Xader Vartec. I laughed and cried. Well, I thought about laughing and crying and that’s pretty cool. When is this a violation of DMCA and when is it an artistic or scholarly work? The musical version is odd, too.

So what is the barrier or border or interface between speech and software? When should we be afraid of “DMCA-restricted speech”? Only while the algorithm is not broken? Always? Until the copyright runs out? Is this all wrong?

Fairplay and PlaysForSure are pretty funny names for systems whose sole purpose in life is to keep you from playing things. It either restricts you from playing at all in some cases, to restrict where you can play things (on which music player) in other cases. They ought to call them “DoesntPlay” and “FailsForSure”, but I guess they want us to want to use them.

The other day I saw a review of a media player, and the author said it needed DRM. I was totally confused at first. DRM is there to keep you from copying, backing up, and playing files. Why is that a feature? Then I realized that the music industry is winning a PR battle in this regard. What they really meant is that the device needed compatibility with music services, because it only played unencumbered music in popular formats (mp3, ogg, and many others) and played them well. It didn’t play DRMed music, because the manufacturers didn’t want to invest in schemes that ultimately aren’t going to work anyway. As a result, iTunes and some of the other pay-for-play services didn’t work for the reviewer.

The answer isn’t that we wanted our music players to restrict us from playing and copying music. Who wants that? What the consumers really want is to use services like MagnaTune and eMusic where you get your music without the DRM and you can make backups and transfer it, but they want to have access to the majors’ catalog. No, you don’t get the same extensive catalog of songs, because the major labels still don’t get it. They think that we will buy their DRMed nonsense and abide by their rules (like *buying* a second copy if something bad happens to the device that held our first, not using devices or music programs they didn’t approve, etc). I guess the “winning” is here because at least one product reviewer has been drinking what they’re spewing. Personally, I like having freedom to copy among my player devices (I have multiple, and my wife has an iPod) and to make backups and to use Linux media players whose authors don’t pay contract fees and licensing fees to any recording agencies. I’m happier this way. So I can’t download the latest Brittany song…. I think that I’m happier without it. I certainly feel cleaner.

There is no real market for music that we can’t rip, back up, copy to all my players (including game consoles and dvd players), listen on all my computers (Linux, Mac, etc), burn to any media we like, and listen to in any circumstances we deem appropriate. That’s what the market clearly wants, and was ready to go against the big 4 and even copyright law via P2P and other mechanism to establish. The old market for non-DRM CDs was better than the current “DRM enriched” market (as recent shakeups and sales reports establish). The online market is better yet. My music needs to be portable and shiftable. The pay-per-play will never fly, and DRM is a waste of time. I wish I could make the RIAA see that, but smarter people than me have tried.

But this is a new year. Bill Gates knows that DRM can’t work, so maybe there is a chance someone will catch on. Sadly, MS pushed out the Zune all laden with WontPlayForYou… err… PlaysForSure, so maybe he’s not as influential as he should be.

A new CNET article, Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording, steams me. I suppose they consider that listening to their products is too easy, and people may want to listen more than once. They refer to it as “fair competition” but I consider it “poor customer relations.” I hope that either a) they don’t do something this stupid, or that b) they do this, and nobody ever uses their products so that they fold.

The whole point of radio, from a consumer’s point of view, is that you can hear new things without paying for them. Recording radio is only so useful, but if someone leaves a recorder running then I think that’s the natural result of making the material available at no cost (like recording TV shows). If they are just time-shifting, format-shifting, and replaying then I don’t see the least bit of harm and no profit to the person recording (only utility). There are already laws to deal with illegal reselling. I don’t think we need to erode our fair use in order to support some crazy new business model that the broadcasters want to put in place.

There is no legal right or ethical imperative that one should pay money to be entertained, or that one should pay more money each time a particular artifact entertains them. We don’t rent our childrens’ toys by the hour for playtime, and no moral issues are raised. We paid for it once, and we play as we choose.

This is silly, and it can’t work, and it’s going to waste a lot of time and money and make a lot of people unhappy. DRM is not a service to the consumer, and so consumers don’t want it. It’s not good marketing.

I offer this both as a source of public ridicule, er… i mean feedback, and also as an aid to those GP2x users who are even as clueless about video as I am/was. Enjoy:

SOURCE=\"$1\"
DESTINATION=\"$2\"
help() {
    echo \"$0  [|]”
    echo “Copies a .mov file to a gp2x-compatible .avi file”
    echo “If destinationfile is not give, the name will match the .mov input file, but ”
    echo “end in .avi”
}
	
if [ -z “${SOURCE}” ]; then
    help
    echo “No SOURCE filename was given.”
    exit 1
fi
	
if [ ! -f “${SOURCE}” ]; then
    help
    echo “Source file ‘${SOURCE}’ does not exist or is not a regular file”
    exit 2
fi
	
basename=$(basename “$SOURCE” .mov)
if [ -d “${DESTINATION}” ]; then
    DESTINATION=”${DESTINATION}/${basename}.avi”
fi
	
if [ -z ${DESTINATION} ] ; then
    DESTINATION=”${DESTINATION}/${basename}.avi”
fi
echo “$SOURCE -> $DESTINATION”
/usr/bin/mencoder “${SOURCE}” -of avi  -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o “${DESTINATION}”
	

I am amazed. I have the following games on my gp2x, all from the german GP2X file archive.

I continue to try to find ways to convert movies for my GameParkHoldings GP2X handheld media and game player (which, by the way also plays a pretty nice assortment of games). The GP2X has a pretty narrow list of formats it will play, but I’ve already been able to convert a lot of mpeg and avi files to GP2X-friendly, resized, avi files by using FFMpeg as I reported earlier.

I am a recent user of Democracy TV within Linux. It is basically a video feed aggregator and bittorrent downloader. It gives me access to a pretty decent variety of “channels” (movie feeds) including one for classic animation (Woody Woodpecker, Felix, WWII-era propaganda and entertainment) and one for iPod-ready classic movies. DemocracyTV is also a player, so you can watch your movies in it. It’s quite the “mashup.” It gives me access to legally downloadable old media, and that’s a joy to me.

Sadly, my classic movie and cartoon channels like to give me .MOV files. I get .AVIs (most of the time) from Public Domain Torrents and only need to reformat for my small screen and ensure that the format & tags please the finicky handset’s player. With DemocracyTV, so now I need the QuickTime movies converted to DivX/AVI files. I can’t get FFMPEG to do that for me, so I need a new free tool.

My new toy is MEncoder. MEncoder is the file converter for MPlayer, which is a pretty amazing media player program for Linux. I’ve heard a lot of opinions about the code and the capability, but it seems to play just about anything that you can call “media” for me, and I’ve recently come to understand how difficult a task that might be. I’ve not written a media player, but I appreciate how much variety there is in video encoding.

This evening I just had my first success, and I’m pretty excited about it. I converted an ipod-ready quicktime video to an avi/divx video and successfully played it on my gp2x. The command was

mencoder /holding/84297.mov -of avi -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o Felix-GooseThatLaidGoldenEgg.avi

The movie is an episode of Felix the Cat, The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg. It was chosen because it’s small and because my youngest loves those cartoons. Personally, I’m looking forward to converting over some “Private Snafu” videos, and some full-length movies.

The handheld was a comfort to me on a recent trip to South Carolina. On the way over, I watched the old sci-fi “The Phantom Planet”, and on the way back I watched the Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour classic “My Favorite Brunette”.

In honor of my new year’s resolution to always remain grateful: The whole idea of throwing a bunch of old classics (received for free!) onto a little SD card nearly the size of a postage stamp (costing nearly nothing), and watching it on (rechargable) battery power in a plane at 30K feet is a kick. Who would have envisioned this ten years ago? Or that the operating system in the device and in my laptop is free, with source code I am free to modify. Even having free tools and free documentation on a world wide web to allow me to transform videos is a modern miracle.

It really is a great time to be alive, because even these silly things are possible.