Four, then II

Posted on August 5, 2008 by Arthur

Observations on KDE 4.1:

1. Everytime I restarted, Kate (the editor) and Kopete kept starting up: I didn’t find any references to these programs in the regular location (.kde4/Autostart), so I did a grep on ps (as in ‘ps -e | grep kate’ and ‘ps -e | kopete’), killed both instances and this seems to work. There’s probably a file (cache) related to this, but you know, this is Linux and it doesn’t hurt to kill an app so once in a while.

2. The Wifi Manager: Don’t forget to install the WIFI manager (KWifiManager): it doesn’t get installed by default! Additionally, to force autoconnection to your router, you must store the router password in KWallet.

3. I cannot stand the fact that if I choose to Shutdown KDE, that I have to confirm this in a second dialog box.

4. Both Dolphin and Gwenview currently don’t support RAW image view or thumbnail generation. Nautilus (Gnome’s filebrowser) does.

5. If you keep the control key pressed for a couple of seconds, Konqueror will show the shortcut keys for all links and buttons currently in view. This works pretty good.

KDE starts up pretty fast but takes a while to close off, that is, longer than shutting down Gnome. I’ve seen Windows Vista take longer to close off. Heck, even KDE starts up faster than a (fully) loaded Windows XP. Additionally, I have the feeling that (for example) Konqueror doesn’t properly dispose of its resources. However, I will readily admit that I made KDE the default desktop environment for this computer.

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Four, then

Posted on August 3, 2008 by Arthur

I decided to give KDE 4.1 a go on my current Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) install: There are many sites around with instructions how to install KDE on your Gnome-enabled installation, so I won’t go in too many details. The idea is to add specific Kubuntu sources to apt, log-out by choosing a different window manager (using a different session, particularly if you plan to keep Gnome) and then log-in as usual.

You still need the install applications of course: So, you may want to look for Konqueror (Firefox works OK, but, will look ‘GTK-ish’), Amorok (audio) and Kaffeine (video), KPhotoAlbum and yes, digiKam: Kubuntu uses the (KDE specific?) Adept application to install 3rd party software.

I’ve used KDE 2 and 3 in the past: KDE 4.1 is generally impressive but still shows inconsistencies so once in a while. For example, during the first startup, a default Folder View shows up empty (Desktop): The point (apparently) is that you’re supposed to drag your frequent used applications in there. There are other quirks, like non-hideable panels (what?) and that widget stuff: uh, don’t count on it working too well because, on the overall, it doesn’t feel thought out.

If you can live with that, there are a lot of excellent applications for KDE. Amarok feels like a work of love and makes all those Gnome music players look like Windows 3.1 applications. Kaffeine looks (a lot) less boring than Gnome’s ‘Movie Player’. Konqueror feels fast, but, be forewarned that you probably have to muck around with settings: for example, GMail refuses to work in Konqueror unless you set it to send the ‘Mozilla 1.7’ or ‘Safari 2.0’ identification strings. This is not entirely Konqueror’s fault: Google itself doesn’t (officially) support Konqueror.

Earlier, I was already surprised about Gnome/AWN’s minimal system requirements. The same is true for KDE 4.1: it runs excellent on the current system (a 512 MB Centrino based laptop with one of those crappy GMA video cards).

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Know. Knol.

Posted on July 29, 2008 by Arthur

Last week, Google opened their ‘Knol’ site for the general public: It’s a knowledgebase and it’s targeting the other knowledgebase we learnt to hate and love, Wikipedia. The web itself is divided in the (usual) camps: Love it and Hate it. To me, it looks like Google has actually learned from the problems that Wikipedia (still) has: the site is actually a lot easier to read, plus, contributors don’t seem to be hiding behind usernames. For example, there’s this excellent article on colon cancer, which, by far, seem to be more informational than Wikipedia’s entry. Additionally, it seems that Knol contributors seem to disclose their affiliations to commercial entities. I only find Google’s choice of name a bit unfortunate.

The other site I want to mention is NASA images, which is a site, powered by the Internet Archive, that hosts, you guessed it, NASA images from the past. There’s way too much to discover on that site and I wouldn’t do it an honour to try to fit it in a small paragraph: The Spaceflight section is amazing and comprehensive, albeit a kind of obnoxious to navigate through (kind of ‘sliding’ pictures pop-up interface, that isn’t all to user-friendly). Pictures and photos can be zoomed in and downloaded (for free, of course).

And not at all related, I’ve always been impressed with Truthmapping which at one time I considered to be a useful tool for creating test scenarios (can’t find the link right now at xsamplex). Apparently, the only clone (which claims to be superior to Truthmapping) I’ve found is ‘DebatePoint’, which is open-sourced. It sort of reminds me of Halfbaked (which makes an excellent tool for mapping out ideas).

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Yo. Uh. No.

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Arthur

Earlier I mowed the front part of the lawn and by the time I was finished, I saw the fog roll in. By tonight, I won’t be able to see my lawn so, what was the point of mowing the lawn again?

We saw the movies ‘The Mist’ and ‘Invasion’ yesterday. ‘The Mist’ (a Stephen King adaption), was mediocre: the acting was bad but it actually got (visibly) better after the first half hour. Obviously, the main theme of the movie became more visible too, which is that the main threat against humans are humans themselves. So, generally, it was a mediocre movie with a not-happy-end. This is the funny thing: bad movies and not-happy-ends seem to balance each other out.

The Invasion stars Nicole Kidman and the movie is a remake of the original ‘Body Snatchers’ movie. I mean, how many Body Snatcher movies have been made by Hollywood now? Three, Five, Eight or None? The main theme in this movie was (you never guessed it): Nicole Kidman! Yes, this movie was all about Nicole Kidman! I saw Nicole in bed, in underwear (I didn’t look, but my wife did!), in the kitchen, on the cellphone, in the hallway, on the street, at the table, on the subway, in a car, at the door, in the passenger seat, behind a desk, on the floor, in the washroom, in the train and my favourite part: Nicole in the helicopter! Oh noes: I just spoiled the end for you! So, to summarize, she looks absolutely fantastic it makes you forget that this was all about body snatching people who are, well, how can I say this appropriately, body-snatching people!

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Do Update Now;

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Arthur

Just a couple of minutes ago, I was looking through the wp_posts table and thought enough was enough. There’s a thread over at WordPress where users have been complaining about the bloat and where developers have shrug it off with ‘Space is cheap’. Or, ‘You can delete it easily’. Think of the queries, think of the queries!

First off, there’s a setting you should set in your wp-config file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

To check (and compare) how many revision entries your wp_posts table has:

select
count(*),
post_status,
post_type
from wp_posts group
by post_status, post_type;

You can delete the bloat by issuing:

delete from wp_posts where post_type = 'revision';

If you have access to SSH, you should check the main wordpress folder: since moving to version 2.4, I’ve seen files called ‘core’ in that directory. These are (literally) core dumps and they are huge. Obviously, WP crashes the server at times (I feel sorry for my host): so much for ‘light-weight’ or ‘state of the art’. Oh wait, I can hear the punch-line, what is it?

Oh yes: “Code is Poetry”.

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Sonic Youth

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Arthur

So yeah, I’ve been a Sonic Youth (official site) listener for the longest time, which I’ve mentioned here from the very start. I’ve been planning to add a sound fragment to this category, but every time I end up doubting which song to pick from. I decided to go with Schizophrenia (30+ second long sound sample): I thought ‘Bull in the heather’ was a bit too easy (that’s Kathleen Hanna doing some weirdo dance in that clip) and ‘Expressway to Your Skull’ a bit too hard to cut through. I was tempted to use the latter, only because (and Sonic Youth fans probably remember) the song was originally titled ‘Sean, Madonna and Me’. The band members had some kind of obsession with Madonna: In the early eighties, the band released the Whitey Album under name ‘Ciccione Youth’, which some of you may remember as Madonna’s original last name (For a second I thought ‘Youth against racism’ was part of the album too, which it isn’t).

What can I say about the band what you don’t know already? Most of the info on Wikipedia seems to be the similar of what I remember out of my head: I remember reading a booklet on Sonic Youth (which was part of a collector edition) which had a lengthy discussion on the band’s split with their record company SST (Husker Du et al). The band has been called the most ‘intelligent’ guitar band of our time and that only because of their weird guitar tunings and musical experiments: I did indeed attend one of their concerts in The Netherlands. I recall drills being hauled on stage. I can’t remember what that was all about, but it was amusing. Not to everybody’s liking, I guess and probably not really an event to take your girlfriend to (that is unless she’s a fan too). Also, if you’re familiar with Hal Hartley, Sonic Youth’s music was heavily featured in his movie ‘Simple Men’ (“I can’t stand the quiet”), with Elina Lowensohn dancing on ‘Kool Thing’. Which is a kind of cool, if you’re into Hal Hartley movies.

There are plenty of videos of live performances of ‘Schizophrenia’ on YouTube, my favourite one being the one recorded at the Montreal Jazz festival. The song was (surprisingly) also covered by the UK senior choir ‘Young@Heart’: I remember watching the video on YouTube and wasn’t sure what to think of it at that time. Too bad it was removed, earlier this year.

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They Chose China

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Arthur

A couple of months ago, I downloaded the documentary ‘They Chose China’ to my Ubuntu laptop with an intention to watch it some day, whenever I had time. The documentary features American ‘turncoats’ in China: American soldiers, who after the Korean War refused to be repatriated and decided to stay in China. Most of them eventually returned to the US and reintegrated into the Western society (not without problems of course).

This is an excellent documentary, though, English-only: I’m a bit surprised to see it in the realms of Google Video. I’m not sure where I got it from initially, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t via Smashing Telly.

Watching the documentary, I was reminded of the (famous or infamous, whichever your political tendencies) Dutch deserter, “Poncke” Princen. I remember that the debate about him heated up when he briefly returned to The Netherlands to visit a dying familymember: I thought it was weird to watch the anger of former ‘Police Actions’ veterans fan over; after all, all of them took part in the country’s “darkest colonial heritage” (Wikipedia compares those Actions to America’s Vietnam).

Curiously, my dad was dead set against Princen too: I always thought that this had more to do with the fact that he always appeared to indicate that the time after the occupation (the Bersiap period) was more violent than he’d seen in the Japanese camps, although most of his post-traumatic stress originated from the suffering in those camps.

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Starlings

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Arthur

I‘ve been extremely impressed by the difference of fauna between the old and new continent. The very first months living here, I saw bird species I didn’t recognize: seeing for example, the very first bluejay had me startled, since I had not seen it before, I couldn’t give it a name. The pictures on that Wikipedia page don’t do the bird honour: they’re actually quite large.

The other bird I didn’t fully recognize were starlings: There were always plenty of them hopping around in the yard and initially, they reminded me of the other typical bird I’ve seen during my younger years (‘merels’ (warning Dutch)) with one main difference: My first impression was that these starlings were ‘Merels on Extreme-Weight-Control’. And thinking of it, that’s an excellent name for a a reality show.

However, recently I discovered that there’s a proper Dutch name for these birds: We call them ‘spreeuwen’, which, rings a bell, but not as much. They’re considered migrating birds in Europe, which may explain why I initially didn’t recognize them.

I hear that there are Cardinals around: At least I’d know what to call them.

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Candy

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Arthur

I‘ve mentioned a couple of times that I lived a fairly harmless nightlife, where on Saturday nights, I tried to anonymously enjoy a small club (‘The Swing’) in the center of the city I did not live in before returning back to a club in the city I used to live in. I was introduced to this club by a colleague, who’s brother happened to be a bouncer at that place. This is also the club where I befriended people I would have not dared to talk to if it wasn’t for the thing I didn’t mind the, that is dancing or watching other people dance.

It was one of those nights, where I entered the club expecting to be all alone, and was surprised to find one of my female friends, who was apparently with a date, sitting at the sideline of the dance floor, trying to get a dance out. After a quick greeting, I ran to the DJ’s corner to request a song, ran back and danced with my friend to the tunes of ‘Candy’ (sample in usual 30+ seconds) in our best ‘Iggy’ vs. ‘Kate’ style, half-laughingly making fun of each other. Obviously, we where having fun while her date was not. To add to the absurdness of the situation, we discovered her date had gone at the end of the song. So much for ‘Candy, Baby’.

I mention this event, because during my brief return to The Netherlands in 2006/2007, I happened to run into my friend again, to who I brought up the incident. She remembered the event because of the date she was with (who apparently was a person she didn’t really know but who she had run into and had told her about that club) and the fact that I surprisingly showed up out of nowhere. I told her that I vividly remembered that night, because of the absurd turn of events during that obnoxious song: Generally, I don’t dance with other people’s dates but I wouldn’t walk out either.

And, yes, I generally don’t care about Iggy Pop.

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From Thunder back to Sun

Posted on July 24, 2008 by Arthur

Today’s weather was as abnormal as it could be: Weather Canada had issued a weather warning for the region around Saint John, forecasting thunderstorms, heavy rain, windgusts and hailstones as big as 2 cms.

We didn’t get the stones, but rain was so heavy (at times) that one could have surfed down King street on the water that was pouring down the streets. Then, suddenly the sun broke through, heating up the pavement, making it feel dampy and hot outside.

While walking on King street on my way back home, I briefly looked over my shoulder and saw the fog roll in, hiding and covering the harbour side of town, making its way, slowly, up the hill. It was an amazing sight: It was like if the fog covered up for past unpleasantries that happened earlier that day, fixing up things that were undone by rain, thunder and sun. In Saint John, of course, everything returned to business as usual.

If life was like that.

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Alterlinks

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Arthur

I found out that VirtualBox 1.6 (finally) supports Solaris: Earlier attempts were an exercise in futilism (that’s not a word, but I like the sound of it). I did install it on the Windows PC (that’s the one I haven’t touched for ages) and, hurrah (or huzzah). Thank Sun for that (after all, they bought up VirtualBox, in March or something. I was a kind of disappointed after I saw the ‘Java Desktop’ pop-up: Gnome. It’s fairly well organized though.

Via Metafilter, I was redirected to ‘OpenSourceFood’ (original Metafilter thread), which is a site where people share recipes under the Creative Commons license. I find it silly to have recipes ‘open sourced’: many generations of people already shared recipes for free. Probably related is this entry at xsamplex (the videosite ‘I’mCooked’, which has everything about cooking too, or something).

Last week, I briefly checked out Nimblex, which is a site that allows you to make custom Linux distributions, via a (nifty) Javascript interface. If I’m correct, it’s all based on Fedora and it might fit what you’re looking for. For more finegrained (and complex) custom distributions, you’ll probably want to look at Linux from Scratch, or even better, Debian from Scratch.

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Go Stet Yourself

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Arthur

There’s a long (winding) oped at the New York Times about how Internet users (on online forums) seem to dramatically change the structure of English grammar. This is only interesting because I also have a knack to write long winding nonsensical messages to a family member.

Last Friday, I saw this Pew survey, a quiz so you will, that tests your ‘News IQ’. I did the test too and I ended up in the high 91s: I missed one question and that was the one about how many American soldiers have died in Iraq. What is ‘News IQ’ anyway? What is it supposed to tell me? I mean, if you generally read a lot of newspapers and that, the survey is a piece of cake, but even if you missed questions, how is this quiz going to be significant? That being said: I actually like Pew Research’s main page. They even provide free access to their datasets(that is, you need to register first). Food for statisticians.

So, yeah, ‘The Dark Knight’ was released the other day, and if you don’t know what that is, you should probably check into that Pew survey above. The movie is getting rave review and hits an average of 9.7 at IMDB. No: It can’t be. Without a doubt, this is partly because of Heath Ledger’s untimely death. If you think of it: I bet the actor has a higher approval rating than the current sitting president of the US.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Go version-control yourself.

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Arthur

So, Everybody can jump like this I was going to give a rant about the painful upgrade to WordPress 2.6, but I’ll leave it at that. Wait. Version control has been added to WordPress, which means that you can finally revert to your previous 42-word entry on your mission-critical blog. I can’t wait for blog software that supports branching and merging. Oh: and looking through the WordPress tables, it looks like complete copies of entries are stored in the wp_post table. Hello there, meet bloated tables 1.

On the good side, I’ve been out a lot shooting (apparent) random photos of city life. I found out that my favourite photos aren’t necessarily the ones that I have published online: the very best ones I shot, are actually portrait photos of people. For example, I truly despise making photos of high-action events: There’s always people walking in front, or, during the composition, you find out that the best part of the whole event just went by in a fraction of a metric microsecondFrog and that you just missed out on the World Press Photo of the Year Finals. This is of course different than making portraits, where you can juggle around and play around with the depth of field and lighting. Particularly, lighting.

The drawback of portraits is that you can’t publish them without particular consent from the photographed subjects. There’s privacy and there’s privacy. That is, unless the subject is an animal that can’t talk back. Consider yourself lucky, then.

Meh.

Update: 1. The upgrade was terribly slow, which I think is because the update script probably had to add new columns to tables.

2. WordPress now adds captions to thumbnails, which completely destroys the existing CSS-stylesheet

3. More details on the excess waste after the fold.

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