Sinking Brick

Posted on May 25, 2008 by Arthur

What is more exciting than a rantThe Sinking Brick about rising gas prices and peak oil? Why, a photo of an oil tanker in the Bay, of course!

This week’s attention grabber was Weezer’s video for their new song, ‘Beans and Pork’, which apparently stars prominent YouTube ‘dignitaries’ (MetaFilter). Maybe I’m not really following YouTube, but I only recognized a couple of them. I’m also not really a fan of Weezer’s music. I read that The Barenaked Ladies were the first ones to have used Internet memes in their video production.

The new Indiana Jones (“Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”) came out this week: muchly anticipated with good reviews (7.4 on Rotten Tomatoes). This week, the movie made over 120,000 dollars at the box-office. Earlier, the game “Grand Theft Auto 4” brought in over 500,000 USD in only one week.

So, today, the Phoenix Mars Lander is landing on Mars (ha-ha) and you can (could) follow this at NASA’s Phoenix website (blog). Looking at the mission’s logo, I can’t help thinking that it was inspired by the FireFox logo.

Update (21:08): I guess the Phoenix just (succesfully) landed.

Posted in Hyperlinks, Saint John NB, We-reflect-news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Sinking Brick

Come back to. What?

Posted on May 17, 2008 by Arthur

A Come Back to McAfee!couple of years ago, I bought McAfee’s anti-virus software package, mainly to give a sense of protection to my laptop, which was going to be used by my dad during his stay-over in Nova Scotia, the Summer of 2005. I removed the software a couple of months after he left. Ever since then, McAfee’s has kept me ‘in the loop’ about their latest updates, for no other reason than (of course) trying to sell me their wares.

Just last week, their latest barrage came in, after a couple of month’s of silence and I thought their latest mail was actually questionable but hilarious (see image on the right/above): I mean, that image of a dad and his daughter, that is a bit condescending, as in, “Who’s your daddy”.

Uh. No: but thanks, McAfee. I’ll keep your mailings for now and I can’t wait for your next snugly campaign.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Tagged , | Comments Off on Come back to. What?

Find what

Posted on May 12, 2008 by Arthur

This weekend, I was surprised to see that Google Maps now also shows photos shot at locations (example): these photos are coming from a new service from Google, Panoramio. The site is very beta-ish, but seeing Google’s weight behind this, I fear for Yahoo!’s FlickR future (Note: Microsoft is still working on a photo site like this, but obviously has this ace (More on PhotoSynth) in the hand).

For no particular reason, I ended up watching a whole bunch of videos about ‘cats and treadmills’. You would almost say it’s the latest craze: throw your cat on a treadmill, tape it, mix it with annoying music and upload it to YouTube.

Also, I watched a couple of clips of ‘That Hillary Show’, a parody done by comedian Rosemary Watson: it’s actually excellent, that is, for amateur video. Not something I’d watch for hours, though, and that only because this kind of political satire wears off really fast. I hope miss Watson finds an agent and that she keeps looking for new things to make fun off.

Which brings me to the last checked item on my list: This comic should look familiar if you’re a Monty Python fan (see here for full scene).

Posted in Hyperlinks | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Find what

Interstate

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Arthur

I‘m not System 7really a ‘techno-ambient’ music lover: however, as someone trying to enjoy different styles of music during my twenties I ended up listening and buying into several techno-DJs and musicians. During the early 90s, System 7 became the rage: I happened to like their ‘Interstate’ track, and that only because of the first part (30+ second sound bite). There’s not really much to tell about System 7 except for that they’re still around and that their website reminds of the pre-2000-webdesign age. I think I remember that they had this same webpage in 1996 too. I’m not kidding.

Back to the personal bit: There were basically two clubs in my old hometown. One club focused on playing ‘alternative rock music’ and the other one a mix-and-mash of, uh, well, whatever it’s called nowadays, “house and techno”? I only visited the latter on one occasion and I remember the huge video screens playing psychedelic movieclips (sort of like what your current Windows Mediaplayer is playing) and me overlooking the crowdy dancefloor, probably drinking a soda, because it was still too early in the night to drink alcohol. When the tune of “Interstate” started, I remember asking the DJ the specifics of the track, so that I could buy it the next time I was close to a record shop.

This is not the whole story: System 7 also made it to Roskilde ’96 (they were actually so popular that they played at many of the European Pop fests that year), and obviously, I was there too. This is also where I discovered that live performances of Techno-music can be rather uninspiring and, I quickly forgot about this event. Not really, of course: the music of ‘Interstate’ came back to mind when we were driving the Trans-Canada Highway, last week, for no other reason than reminding me of those uneventful couple of nights.

Update 1: ‘Interstate’ can be heard in this podcast @ Most People Are DJs (at the end of the MP3)

Update 2: This just in and official! Europeans get drunk to have sex!

Posted in Past-the-bridge | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Interstate

Off-ice.

Posted on May 7, 2008 by Arthur

A couple of observations:

I follow the US Democratic race but tend to keep it off xsamplex: However, I keep thinking if the Clintons are just bad losers. Seriously, when is enough is enough? Keith Olberman’s summary perfectly illustrates the race.

I noticed something when using a (more) recent version of Microsoft Word (2003+): it loads documents in a background thread, updating the scrollbar and thumbnail size accordingly, until it is completely loaded into memory. I’m not sure who thought this was a brilliant idea, because, simply stated: it sucks because it suggests that the document is ready to work on when it clearly isn’t.

With the sun coming out longer, it appears that now it’s a good time to get rid of the Winter clothes. This is obviously good weather for a stroll and the camera.

I read that thousands of illegals keep eluding the Canadian Border and Imigration Services (the official count is at 41,000). Is that a high number, I wonder (I wish I had numbers of other countries).

In the past, I’ve read a couple of books by Martin Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, who’s books were, and maybe still are, part of English literature classes in The Netherlands). I especially liked ‘Time’s Arrow’ but since then, I’ve not read any of his books. The CBC has a brief interview with the (nowadays controversial) British author.

Update 1: Not at all related, OpenOffice 3.0 Beta review, courtesy of ArsTechnica.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Off-ice.

Trans-Canada

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Arthur

Reading, Trans Canada highway 3 Quarks Daily’s coverage of the 30th anniversary of e-mail spam, I was reminded that today it’s the 63rd anniversary of (the Dutch) Memorial Day. If today’s your birthday, Happy Birthday. If not, maybe you should attend a local Memorial or Liberation Day event (which is tomorrow).

We were notified of floodings in New Brunswick, last Friday, the day before our drive to Saint John. Arriving here, nothing out of the ordinary seem to have happened: As far as I know, the local Street Hockey Tournament is still on. Plenty of people around too. No panic. At all.

Posted in Saint John NB | Tagged , | Comments Off on Trans-Canada

Aw(n)

Posted on April 26, 2008 by Arthur

So, Avant Window Navigator after the “Ubuntu installation” dust is settling, it’s time to add some ‘candy’ to your desktop. After all, the default Gnome docks look quite boring.

– You can look for Themes and that over at Art at Gnome or GnomeLook. A word of caution: Gnome is not Windows. To install a theme, you download the tar/files, go to System | Preferences | Appearance -> Install. I recommend downloading the ClearLooks Themes (both Application and Window Border themes).

– The next thing is to install AWN, or, the Avant Window Navigator. It’s a sort of Leopard-like Dock and it works seamless with Compiz/Beryl. The good news is that Hardy includes AWN. The bad news is that Hardy doesn’t include the core set of applets. So, include the following lines to Software Sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main

Then, open up a terminal (you can also use the Synaptic Manager) and enter:

sudo apt-get install awn-manager-trunk awn-extras-applets-trunk

AWN will be installed in your Applications Menu. Additionally, the AWN manager will be installed in your System menu. Before you start up AWN, remove the bottom panel first (you don’t need that one anymore). Currently there are 10 to 15 applets available: You can obviously write your own applets too.

Earlier, I downloaded the trunk of the latest Banshee sources: I’ve opted to discard of RhythmBox Music Player only because Banshee allows the use of bookmarks, something I found handy while downloading and listening to the several CBC and PBS podcasts. The good thing is that most of Banshee’s dependencies (the libraries, the libraries) are included in Hardy (except for the latest GDK/GTK libs).

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged | Comments Off on Aw(n)

Dark is the night

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Arthur

There were a couple of interesting things that made it in my reading list, this week:

  • Obviously, you may have heard of the official launch of Ubuntu ‘Hardy Heron’ (or if you’re into version numbering, version 8.04). There’s lots of praise for Ubuntu around the Internet. The issues I’ve been dealing with were the sound issues as mentioned in earlier posts. Is Ubuntu ready to take on Windows? Not yet, but, I don’t think that’s the point of it: However, without a doubt, Ubuntu (and generally any Linux flavour) breathes new life in your older hardware1, 2.
  • Via Metafilter, I found a whole set of Hubble photos dedictated to galactic collisions. The photos are available in different sizes3
  • The same Metafilter has a link to HP’s RPN calculators. I had one of those too: they actually work OK, although, yes, you need to get used to it. Earlier this week, I was a kind surprised to find that Gnome’s calculator doesn’t have an option to set it to an RPN-mode.
  • InformIT has an interview with Donald Knuth. Knuth apparently uses Ubuntu.
  • So, the OLPC (the one laptop per child project) is steering towards making a deal with Microsoft, possibly hinting at dropping Linux for a Windows XP-based platform.

What else?

1 I must admit that I think FireFox 2.0 should have been part of the 8.04 release: the current FireFox 3.0 has definitely some “irregularity” issues.

2 The popularity of Ubuntu apparently is causing slowdowns at the Ubuntu repositories.

3 Related (a whole set of interacting galaxies at NASA, all in one picture)

Posted in Hyperlinks | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Dark is the night

Huh. huh?

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Arthur

I wasMrs. Clinton trying to play a QuickTime movie on Ubuntu (“Hardy Heron”, 8.04) and was surprised to find out that Totem (the default Mozilla plug-in for streaming movies) had a (ahem) hard time to play the movie. VLC to the rescue: well, almost. It’s the codecs, dude.

First verify if the ‘ubuntu-restricted’ downloads are installed: You can either issue an ‘sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras’ or you can look in the ‘Add/Remove’ option in the Application Menu. Select ‘All Available Applications’ and do a search for ‘ubuntu-restricted’. If not, on to the hard way.

First I recommend to get rid of the default Mozilla/Firefox video plugin (which is Totem and it totally sucks): sudo apt-get remove totem-mozilla mozilla-plugin-vlc xine-plugin kaffeine-mozilla helix-player mozilla-helix-player.

Then, install Mplayer by invoking sudo apt-get install mplayer mozilla-mplayer

After this, you should be able to view Quicktime movies in all of your installed videoplayers (Totem, VLC and MPlayer). When MPlayer is installed, don’t forget to enable the software-mixer in the preferences: and if you’re SOL, you may want to restart the computer right after that (I had some bad luck with my machine which may have been unrelated to the MPlayer installation).

I think my troubles started with the fact that I originally installed ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ on my machine: the dist-upgrade to Hardy Heron, issued just yesterday, most likely didn’t automatically finish the setup of the ‘ubuntu-restricted’ package, so, if you started out from scratch with ‘Hardy Heron’, you should not have any troubles viewing WMV/Quicktime, since it is supposed to have been installed. If you plan to stick to Gutsy (and upgrade to Hardy afterwards) , you most likely want to follow the steps mentioned above.

And now, back to watching Apple trailers or, uh, watching Evil Hillary movies.

Update 1: Notice that even if you issue ‘manual apt commands’, the installed packages will add the correct program icon to the appropriate ‘Application menu’ in Gnome. I assume, the same is true if you’re working with Kubuntu or Xubuntu.

Update 2: If you noticed that Ubuntu has problems playing sound in concurrent sessions (i.e. sound in a Flash player goes OK in FireFox, but no sound in MPlayer/Banshee or vice versa), you should definitely follow these instructions to correct the problem. Requires some editing of resource files: nothing spectacular.

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Huh. huh?

Rivets

Posted on April 20, 2008 by Arthur

Earlier Kittenthis week, I read about a new study on the sinking of the Titanic: Two experts on metallurgy claim that rivets of sub-quality were the main reason why the Titanic’s outer hull gave in so quickly:

“A rivet works by holding two plates together on a ship. And, during the collision, pressure, or load on that plate would have caused the heads of the rivets to pop open. So, the theory really is that the sub-quality iron caused weak rivets, and therefore, the seams were weak, and opened up during the collision.”

The authors say that because of pressure to finish two equivalent ships and other financial reasons, the shipbuilder Harland and Wolff was forced to buy up material of providers that may have have not been of consistent quality. A Harland and Wolf spokesman disputed these claims:

“We always say there was nothing wrong with the Titanic when it left here

Your job as a spokesman sucks when you have to defend something that happened almost 100 years ago. To Harland and Wolff’s credit: they maintain an excellent website about the construction, maiden trip and the tragedy of the Titanic. If that doesn’t fix your ‘centennial Titanic addiction’, the US NOAA also maintains a site about the current ‘resting place’ of the ship. Excellent pictures and videos (multiple formats) there too. If your daily hobby is metallurgy (Don’t feel quilty about it: everybody enjoys hammering on iron things!), the NIST has a whole set of PDF files on the rivets of the Titanic.

And now a word from my sponsor. Cute, riveting kitties

Posted in Hyperlinks | Tagged | Comments Off on Rivets

Them links

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Arthur

Via Suzanne Vega’s site, I found out that she nowadays (also) blogs for the New York Time’s ‘Measure for Measure’ periodical. There are other musicians writing for that very same blog: the only (other) familiar author is Roseanne Cash.

You’re probably aware that music and mathematics are quite related: Pythagoras was quite interested in music and his theories form the basis of current musical notation. Anyway: Three music professors have come up with a new way to analyze and categorize music and notes.

I forgot to mention it in earlier (Ubuntu) entries: In a couple of days (5 to be exactly), the new Ubuntu is to be released, properly named ‘Hardy Heron’ (or rather 8.04). You can download (complete) test versions (RC3, I believe) from the ‘Ubuntu testing’ website. You can also upgrade your current 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”) to this test version using Ubuntu’s Update Manager. If you’re curious what’s going to be new, here are “Hardy Heron”‘s release notes.

Update: I just updated to the RC of Hardy Heron. You should definitely install the compiz graphical effects manager by invoking ‘apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager’. The manager will appear in your System menu: have fun playing with the options.

Posted in Scientifically, Ubuntu | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Them links

More Ubuntu

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Arthur

MoreA dragonfly annotations on Ubuntu:

  • The installation of MonoDevelop was a no-brainer: I think the .Net runtimes are installed the moment you install Ubuntu. I may port one minor application to Mono, if I have time later this evening.
  • At one time, I despised the multiple ‘desktop’ panels that are part of (most) Linux Windows managers. Nowadays, I’ve learnt to appreciate it: I gather that you should keep them limited to 2 or 4. I chose to keep the default set of panels (2 columns, 1 row)
  • Generally, keyboards shortcuts follow Mac and Windows standards. You may want to see into this document explaining all (or most) known shortcut keys known for Gnome and KDE.
  • I heart Audacity, which was one of the first apps I installed yesterday. Getting the application to both record and play was a bit of a nuisance: Make sure to go into the preferences (Edit | Preferences) and set both PlayBack and Recording sections to the proper sound card devices. I only got this going (both recording and playback) by plainly experimenting. The default Audacity settings definitely won’t work right out of the box.
  • Talking about sound: I haven’t settled on which mediaplayer to use. For now I use Ubuntu’s default one, which is RythmBox.
  • The specific graphical effects (I think these come from Compiz, which is installed by default too) work good on the built-in (and ‘low-end’) Mobile Intel 910 GMA card. So do the transparency effects, but, I have seen these in earlier Knoppix versions (which is KDE based, as you probably know) so these don’t really surprise me.

Without a doubt, you’ll run in a couple of hardware weirdness, all of them generally easy to solve: Ubuntu has started a LaptopTesting wiki where contributers test and write about their experiences installing Ubuntu on older laptops. An excellent resource, particularly for the laptop (an HP NC6120) I used. In my case, the Wifi-LED didn’t reveal if it was active or not while Ubuntu had already correctly made a WIFI connection to my network. This was easily fixed and it actually changed the behaviour of the WIFI-LED: currently the LED is blinking while it tries to make a connection (or whenever it finds wireless networks). That’s even better, not?

Update 1: For more recent versions of software, you should check out GetDeb, from which you can get the latest version of UFRaw (which I mentioned earlier).

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged | Comments Off on More Ubuntu

Rice’s fxxx-xx boots

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Arthur

I was Ms. Rice and those bootsreading about the principals of the US torture memo. In one of the blogs I saw a reference to this meeting which included a quite less flattering description of ms Rice (the US Foreign Affairs secretary):

Think about it — a president who used to shove firecrackers up the asses of frogs and light them to watch the frogs explode. A vice-president who shot a friend in the face. A female Secretary of State in f**k-me boots who gets off on torture. An attorney general who’s afraid of calico cats, offended by a statue’s breasts, and anoints himself with vegetable oil. And he’s the SANE one, the one who was troubled by the whole proceeding. ed. apropriatinized

I guess, the boots thing, refers to that event in Germany, where Rice’s entrance and fashionable sight caused the press to focus on her instead of the Bush policies.

Posted in We-reflect-news | Tagged | 1 Comment