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Most of my CD collection is ripped into OGG files. I have an ad hoc set of perl scripts to edit the Vorbis comments, search them, play the search results, plus load them into my iRiver. With MP3 files one is limited to a strict set of comments, including one genre. The Vorbis comments to the OGG files is a key value set that allows the same key to have many values. One song could be labeled with many genres, and I usually did. Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade is in the genres: “Big Band”, “Swing”, and also my own special genre “relax”, My “relax” genre is a exclusive set of songs that help me lower my blood presure. Loaded this song into KDE’s amarok, not only can I only edit the first genre labled, but all other “genre” tags are wiped out when I do so. It tries to fit the very flexable Vorbis comment structure into the limited MP3 structure. KDE’s Juk produced similar results.

I told Daphne about this problem, she said I ask for too much. I, one the other hand, am just trying to stop using the keyboard so much and not go not resort my entire music collection. So, is there a solution? Do I go back to my ad hoc scripts? Do I ask for too much? Does this sound like a bad Sex, and the City parody?

Our friend Michael got a Fujitsu Lifebook P7010D (which was in my running list of cool laptops). But he needed it to run both Window$ and Linux.

About six months ago, I set up SuSE on it. Most things worked, but the wireless support didn’t really do well, even with the latest MadWifi stuff.

To try from scratch, Michael did a fresh install of Ubuntu and was interested in having another shot at making things work. After switching him from Gnome to KDE (which lets you use the YYYY-MM-DD format for dates, in comparison to not finding anything similar for Gnome), an install of the 915resolution package (installed via its normal package interface under Applications -> Add/Remove -> Advanced) and its magic modifications of the BIOS video settings finally made it be 1280×768 instead of 1024×768. This is going to be filed as a bug so Ubuntu can help get rid of this step in the process; it should’ve seen the kind of video device in use and automagically installed and used this.

To make the wireless work, I just followed the great HowTo made by the MadWiFi folks. I had to install make and linux-source-2.6.15 in order to actually build it, in addition to taking these steps:

cd /usr/src
tar -jxf linux-source-2.6.15-26-386.tar.bz2
cd linux-source-2.6.15-26-386
ln -s `pwd` /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/build
make oldconfig
make
… and hit ctrl-c once it set up all the headers and such and started building things like mounts.o

Of course, none of this should really have been necessary—in particular, I’m sure I just missed some other step that would’ve created the build symlink for me.  But, more to the point, Ubuntu’s version of the madwifi/Atheros support should be getting updated, shouldn’t it?

Ofter, I remember a stupid little thing I did in Perl once that I can’t find again. The problem is I can’t remember where I put it. So I’m putting this here with hopes to remember to look next time I need it.

Usually when I wish to print the progress of something that takes a long time I use CPAN‘s Term::ProgressBar, but you need to know how many elements you have to do this. Instead I thought it would be cool to keep track of time, but printing time - $^T gets sort of meaningless after a few hours of running. So, the quicky, super-duper, way to print out h:mm:ss seems to be, where $t holds the number of seconds so far: printf STDERR "$0: %d:%02d:%02d\n", $t/(60*60), $t/60 % 60, $t % 60;

And this prints it out with little fuss. A little stupid to make public, but nobody reads my logs anyway.

Rather then getting a new computer 余艾蕾 told me I get to use her old one. After some arm twisting, I convinced her that we don’t need it to duel boot, but she gave some conditions:

1. We have to be able to upload photos from the camera phone.
2. The Videos we have have to be able to play on the Linux box.
3. Using the printer should be easy.

Requirment two is easy, the video’s are from the Canon PowerShot A75, no problem there. They have been burnt to a CD and all is swell. Requirment one was the issue of last night.

The Nokia has two methods to upload files, IR and Bluetooth. I booted Kubuntu’s desktop CD and it was running BlueZ, and KDE comes with a cute bluetooth tool, so I started working on that solution. I had never really done anything with bluetooth before, and was not really sure what it was, but I thought I’d try anyway.

I plugged in the the USB bluetooth adaptor we had and, blåt, error message. I don’t quite remember what the error was exactly, but it was something like “Nah! Nah! Nah! You need to keep a copy of Windows around. Dweeb! Get a life.” Well, it all worked out in the end, skipping the:

• Cussing.
• Cat abusing (filling Marvin’s water bowl up with ice).
• Anger because the KDE keyboard switcher has the same icon for the US keyboard as it has for Dvorak.
• Disdain of stupid user friendly KDE things (which are most like configurable, unlike Mac OS X).
• Wondering if there is a GUI way to use the IR port.

On an Ubuntu form some place I was pointed to http://www.bluez.org/download.html
and the bluez-firmware-1.2.tar.gz file and installed it. After restarting the BlueZ stuff, I plugged in the bluetooth adaptor and, bing, no error message.  A little mucking around on the phone, and up came an image.

What is really cool, is that with the Kubuntu desktop CD I can do this without uninstalling the hard drive first.  The bad part is I have to redo it after I figure out everything.

Tonight, the printer.

Back in November 2004 I got an HDTV signal from comcast, but 1080i never worked on my Zenith television even though it said it should. The solution was to lower it to 480i. The Comcast guy said I should complain to Zenith that that there 1080i was broken, but 480i is much better then 480p and I was happy.

Last night I wanted to watch a novelas on Telemundo, and checked to see if it had English subtitles. The first problem is that I had to turn off the Comcast box to change the caption settings, so there is no surfing through the CC* settings. You have to turn off the cable box, go into the menu, change the Closed Caption channel, turn back on the box which always puts you at CN8, and then switch back to Telemundo. No English subtitles for the novelas ☹. Rather then manually set the settings, I just set the settings to default.

Last May the cable box had a major upgrade, I had not played with these settings since before then. The default button also reset the resolution, and I could not see a thing on the television. As the HD signal didn’t seem to work I had to dig out a cable to plug in the 480p connector. I got the menu back, but trying to set it to 480i didn’t work. Flickering screen, I think the box crashed a couple of times, when it stablized 480i it still didn’t work. So I set it to 1080i and was going to work the resolution down, but then it worked at 1080i! It was kind of late, and the novelas was over, so I just went to bed. So tonight I should be able to watch Hip Hop from the Hamptons Featuring Fabolus on INHD2 in full 1080i.

It was the fault of Comcast the entire time, not Zenith.

There was a grad student here that wrote a Perl program to compute the Jaccard coefficent of some Blast data. The Mac he was using has 8G of memory, but come to about 2GB of memory usage Perl would crash. I reworte it into two programs, first to dump all his data to a gdbm file, then processed that file using the Jaccard coefficent. It never used more then 2G and finished, it took like a day longer to run but we got what we wanted. This all happened a few months ago, and for this and other reasons we moved that project to Solaris.

A few days ago one of our sysadmin was investigating a complaint on why Perl on MacOS X was slow. He built the same Perl twice, one using the system’s malloc(3), the other using the malloc shipped with Perl. Using the original program computing Jaccard coefficent, with a small dataset, it used 1,220 CPU seconds with Apple’s malloc, but only 605 CPU seconds with Perl’s! I asked him to run it with the full data set. Apple’s malloc crashed after 116,700 CPU seconds and ~2.3GB of memory. With Perl’s malloc it used 65,469 CPU seconds and finished after using ~2.8GB of memory.

So happy SysAdminDay!

When Brendan was at Widener he got himself a television.  When he moved to the Bay Area he left it.  Ever since then I’ve had it, and it’s been getten worse and worse.  The tuner has always been fine but the picture has been getting smaller and smaller.  Somebody once told me that if you don’t mind putting a solder gun to it you can replace the broken chip.  I put it out on the curve last night.

Up came waltzing a black man, he picked it up and shook it.  Across the street stood an old truck with a latin man waiting in the cab.  Off they drove with Brendan’s television.  I’d like to think it’s life has just begun.

Going through immigration in Ottawa yesterday, the nice lady asked me a bunch of questions. She finished with, “Do you have a computer with you?” I replied that yes, I had a laptop (as would lots of other people at the GCC Developers Summit I’m attending). Boy was “yes” a wrong answer.
I was sent to a mystical back room for a further search. A big guy in a police uniform did a cursory look at my two bags, then focused primarily on my laptop. He opened it, turned it on, asked me to log in, and with the screen turned away from me proceeded to click his way around the system. (It’s my backup laptop running a 2-letter commercial O$ … I so wished I had Linux on it instead, just to see if they’ve any idea what to do.)

He explained he was looking for “objectionable material, which most people think is just child pornography.” Nope, it’s anything that may cause offence (left to be defined) including “beastiality” and anything that is “traitorous”.

I asked if there’s a list somewhere listing what they go looking for; he repiled, “Well, if there’s any kind of a match there’s a database we consult,” and continued—click, click … click. “Do you use your computer to connect to the Internet?”

What the hell kind of question is that? I felt like I was back in 1984 dialing up to Telenet.

I just stood there looking around, my brain pondering all sorts of things: is the arbitrary examination of your personal files legal? What would he do if it were any other OS? Why would anyone transporting illegal stuff like child porn leave it in any form this guy with Windows Explorer could find? Why not encrypt it all and rename it to “quicken.exe”? Why not just wait and download everything over a secure link once you’ve gotten to your hotel? The possibilites are endless.

When he’d finally seen enough to satisfy himself, he gave me the laptop back and said I could leave. Meanwhile my friend Doug’s out in the baggage area waiting to see if I’d ever show up after walking up to the immigration people at the same time.

I still wonder if it’s equally legal to open up a binder full of paper and start reading what’s on the sheets, waiting to see something derogatory about the Prime Minister.

Canada appears to have its own Department of Homeland Decency.

I have been using most of my pants to work around the house, so most of them are not up to wearing to work. As construction is nearing an end, a couple of weeks ago I drove a bunch of old pants to a local church that takes old clothing donations, including all my jeans. I almost threw out my old jeans, but I thought they could be used for patches. Why patches? It seems I have big balls. All my jeans had holes right where my gonads are, I put patches on and they wore holes through the patches.

Yesterday Zoë and I went to Sears, and I got two new pairs of Levi’s, 505 and 550. Today I’m wearing the 550s, so I’m sitting at work with oddly blue pants. Tomorrow, or shortly there after, I plan on wearing the 505s. The test is to see which pair wears through first. When I lived in San Francisco, Levi’s home city, I got a pair of 506 jeans, after years they had no gonad holes and I wore the the entire pair down to nothing. But Levi’s don’t make the 506 cut anymore, I think 560s are the closest that are currently made.

Maybe next time I’ll order a pair of 506s and give that the gonad test. Maybe I should give up Levi’s Jeans.

Last year my favorite laptop suffered a horrible death at the hands of hardware failure.

Now my Sony Vaio TX1XP laptop, only about 7 months old, has also failed. The power plug on the back was a bit loose, and has become looser over the last few weeks. With it came the too-familiar problem of getting it to realize it’s been plugged in. Today, it finally wouldn’t see the power no mater what angle I tried to twist it. I used the last 2-1/2 hours of battery life to back stuff up and restore the factory image back onto it. (As opposed to sending it off for repair with all of my stuff still there. At least I use unique SSH keys for each lifetime of the machine.)

I’ll call the Sony Vaio customer support line, walk thru the troubleshooting steps, and get them to send me the box used to get it repaired. Can’t do that til late next week, though, so fingers crossed.  A few days ago I found a forum online where people described the same exact problem, but of course I can’t seem to find it now.  (And didn’t bookmark it, shame shame.)
At least this all happened today, a Saturday, as opposed to any time earlier this week when I was hammering on some time-critical work with it. (And had to do the work under XP.)

I wonder if I’ve got bad laptop karma.