Subway Chronicles

2009-03-10T15:00:00.001-04:00

testing out @pingfm http://ping.fm soon i'll be omnipotent... geeknipotent.

Colbert at it again

2008-12-02T01:11:00.001-04:00

Stephen Colbert wants to humble Kanye West by asking us all to buy his Christmas Special album off iTunes at exactly 5:00pm eastern on Wednesday 3rd December 2008 (next Wednesday). The intention is to bump West's album off its spot on the iTunes top 10 list. I'm assuming that Colbert is operating on the logic that the top 10 list works in a very digg-like fashion where it measures sudden changes over a short time-delta. I think that's a safe assumption since that's how iTunes' podcast top 10 operates as well. It's all a ridiculous and completely Colbert-like stunt to get us to buy his crappy stuff. But at the same time Kanye West is highly overrated musically (imho), and basically Vanilla-Ices many of his songs. What would you do?

how to install the cisco vpn client on linux

2008-11-28T13:07:00.012-04:00

Cisco has this VPN client that a fair number of workplaces use for secure wireless access. It has a Windows, MacOS and Linux client. The problem is the Linux client doesn't actually ever work in my experience. The problem is manyfold depending on where you get it. I've had to use it at NYU as another wireless access means. NYU offers an old version that only works on old kernels. So that's a problem. The fact that it even works as a kernel module that has to be recompiled with every new kernel also is lame. As I say it, I wonder if DKMS solves that problem. The next problem is that its hard to find. It's one of those encryption tools that's considered weaponry by some terrorism law, so it's not made easily downloaded, and it's probably illegal to distribute. Of the Universities that offer it, every one has their version only available to its students. Googling can solve that problem though.

In any case, here's how to get it running on Linux

First make sure and get the latest version. That way you can be sure that it works with a recent kernel.
Get the kernel headers for the kernel that you're using. It should be installed automatically on ubuntu at least, but it may not be as is the case with the array.org kernel in use on my eeepc. On ubuntu you can try

apt-cache search linux-headers-`uname -r` -n
and then select a package name and install it with
sudo apt-get install kernel-headers-package-name

Get the vpn client patch from Alexander Griesser's site. He maintains an unofficial set of patches for the different client versions. Without his work, it would be useless, since I've never actually seen it work anywhere without it.

wget -q http://projects.tuxx-home.at/ciscovpn/patches/vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff

Extract the vpn client. Let's call it vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.01.0640-k9.tar.gz

tar xvzf vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.01.0640-k9.tar.gz

Move the patch into the vpnclient folder and patch the client

cd vpnclient && mv ../vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff . && patch < vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff

Run the install. There will be prompts. The default options should suffice.

sudo ./vpn_install

Run the client with

sudo /etc/init.d/vpn_client start

Now the actual VPN settings are kept in /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles with a different text file corresponding to a different VPN, each with a .pcf file extension. You can copy the sample one and edit it to make changes.

cd /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles && cp sample.pcf myvpn.pcf

In the case of NYU there are settings detailed on the official page that can be retrofitted to apply to the Linux version. Someone has already done that though. Here's a copy of the settings that one has to put in their profile. I think the UserPassword field can be filled in so you don't have to put it in yourself everytime you connect, but I wouldn't risk having your password in cleartext like that. The username should have your NetID not the word netid

[main]
Description=NYU VPN
Host=vpn.nyu.edu
AuthType=1
GroupName=nyu-vpn
GroupPwd=nyu-net
EnableISPConnect=0
ISPConnectType=0
ISPConnect=
ISPCommand=
Username=netid
SaveUserPassword=0
EnableBackup=0
BackupServer=
EnableNat=1
CertStore=0
CertName=
CertPath=
CertSubjectName=
CertSerialHash=00000000000000000000000000000000
DHGroup=2
ForceKeepAlives=0
UserPassword=
enc_UserPassword=
TunnelingMode=1
TCPTunnelinPort=443

Once you've made a profile just run this command to connect. myvpn would be replaced by the name of the profile file you just made sans the .pcf extension

vpnclient connect myvpn

Miniscule Greasemonkey Tip - Better Hotmail with Windows Live Hotmail 2008 - Cleaner

2008-11-28T01:31:00.007-04:00

Okay, We're all stuck with hotmail because it was our first e-mail address. But the new version has abnormally large fonts and an ad placement that squishes down the available vertical screen real estate further. This sucks since it's a premium as it is on a widescreen monitor, but there is a Greasemonkey script that fixes this called Windows Live Hotmail 2008 - Cleaner. It remedies both of those problems.

How to convert videos to XviD compatible with the iAudio X5 using Mencoder

2008-11-15T16:10:00.019-04:00

Well as long as I'm posting howtos, I did post one to a forum once when I was trying to figure out how to transcode video for the iAudio X5 when I had it, so here it is (It's for any platform that menocder runs on, not just on Linux. I've run it on Windows before)

I did spend a little while in the man page of mencoder and figured this out:

mencoder movie.mov -ofps 15 -vop scale=160:120 -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=800 -lameopts cbr:br=128 -o movie.avi

movie.mov is the original file and movie.avi is the X5 playable version. This transcodes a 4x3 movie. Switch 120 with 90 for a 16x9 movie. It doesn't work perfectly though. the 15 is 15 fps which should work but many frames looked skipped out when playing it back and it has a really choppy effect. I figured that the source videos which were 24fps were actually being brought down to 12fps by the iaudio software, but when I use 12fps in that command it doesn't work. (Perhaps it does and something else was wrong but that seems like the best explanation to me. This is because 30fps videos also seem to be brought down to 15fps and when I tried it with a few videos it didn't work then either) Why this doesn't work is beyond me. I haven't tweaked it any further to try to get it working any better, nor have I tried to transcode stuff using ffmpeg. Does anyone have any better ideas?

As it is though that command is unweidly but you could put this in the mplayer.conf located in .mplayer folder in the your home folder. So if it's not there make

~/.mplayer/mplayer.conf

and put this in

[iaudio4x3]
profile-desc="XviD with MP3 resized to 160x120 at 15fps for use on the iAudio X5"
ofps=15
vop=scale=160:120
ovc=xvid=yes
xvidencopts=fixed_quant=1
oac=mp3lame=yes
lameopts=cbr=1:br=128

[iaudio16x9]
profile-desc="XviD with MP3 resized to 160x90 at 15fps for use on the iAudio X5"
ofps=15
vop=scale=160:90
ovc=xvid=yes
xvidencopts=fixed_quant=1
oac=mp3lame=yes
lameopts=cbr=1:br=128

And then you could type this instead

mencoder file.mov -profile iaudio4x3 -o file.avi

for a 4x3 movie or

mencoder file.mov -profile iaudio16x9 -o file.avi

for a 16x9 movie

Having said all of this a quick hop on google gives me this blog post which claims to work without issue. I haven't tried it out yet. It uses the regular mpeg codec instead of the xvid codec.
http://www.hlynes.com/2005/10/09/pla...the-iaudio-x5/
It's very detailed with some nice suggestions in the comments but it boils down to this command instead
mencoder inputfile.avi -o outputfile.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=96 -ofps 13 -vf scale=160:108

Finally there's this forum posting on the old iAudioPhile.net forum which has yet another working mencoder setup
http://iaudiophile.net/forums/archiv...hp/t-1805.html
http://www.iaudiophile.net/forums/sh...t=encode+linux
the basic mencoder command is
mencoder IN.avi -o OUT.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -vf scale=160:122 -ofps 15

Miniscule Greasemonkey Tip - Popout Youtube videos into a separate window

2008-11-10T21:57:00.015-04:00

I for one have been vexed that you can't put a youtube video into a separate window the way you can with hulu videos. So, of course, ask and the internet provides. Youtube Pop-out is a greasemonkey script that does just that. Greasemonkey is of course the ingenious javascript plugin engine for Firefox that lets you install scripts that act as plugins that alter the functionality of one, some or all the websites on the internet.

It is one of those value adds that you can get sucked into like any rich platform that offers so much. Kinda like the extensions that are already available for firefox. Anyways because of that I kinda stay away from it because I know I'll just bog down my firefox with dozens of scripts.

The only other one that I have is the Apple Trailer Download which provides a bos with direct download links to the Apple Trailers when you visit an Apple Trailer page.

Any other good greasemonkey scripts come to mind?

Obama: Open Source President?

2008-11-09T15:03:00.001-04:00

Did Alex Castellanos talk about Open Source on CNN? I wonder what OS he's using? I wouldn't go so far as to say he's Open Source. For that analogy to apply the American people would be able to vote on each issue individually, not just for a leader with his set of issues. He's definitely a Web 2.0 President with terms like crowd-sourcing definitely applying to him, and with his team's skillful use of social networking to collaboratively pull opinion from the bottom up rather than just ignoring the people.

For NYU Students: How to connect to NYURoam wireless on Ubuntu (or any Linux with NetworkManager)

2008-11-08T12:55:00.007-04:00

update: This Ubuntu Forums thread has details on how to get a certificate authority file. I added it to this howto. I also added instructions for Intrepid

I made the crazy decision to go to NYU. They have wireless. Their website has instructions for connecting to it with Windows XP, Vista and MacOSX. None for any Linux distributions though. You can glean the Linux instructions from looking at those instructions though. Here's how I do it in NetworkManager. Of course, don't blame me if a bowl of oatmeal falls on your laptop when you attempt this.

Go to https://getca.verisign.com/. Download the certificate from there
It should be a file named getrootcert.cer Run this command on it to change it to a pem file: openssl x509 -in getrootcert.cer -inform d -out verisign.pem
An alternative to the previous two steps is to just use the intended certificate that the original NYU instructions refer to. The previous two steps are in lieu of that, but thanks to A cool dude the proper location for the certificate is /etc/ssl/certs/VeriSign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority_-_G5.pem . There are multiple files with similar names in that folder. If this one doesn't work try one of the others
Click on NetworkManager in the system tray in the corner
Choose Connect to Other Wireless Network...
In the Network Name choose 'nyu' without the single quotes
In the Wireless Security choose WPA2 Enterprise
Leave EAP Method and Key Type as their defaults which are PEAP and Automatic respectively
In Phase2 Type choose MSCHAPV2
In Identity type in your NYU NetID and in Password type in the NetID password
In CA Certificate file choose the verisign.pem, wherever it was saved. OR choose one of the aforementioned /etc/ssl/certs/VeriSign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority_-_G*.pem files
Leave the remaining options as defaults

If it was with Intrepid, the dialog box is slightly different. Also unlike the previous version of this howto for hardy, this won't work unless you have the versign.pem file. after you've gotten your verisign.pem file

When you right-click on NetworkManager click on 'Connect to Hidden Wireless Network...' instead of 'Other Wireless Network' like in Hardy
Type in 'nyu' for the Network Name
choose WPA & WPA2 Enterprise for the Wireless Security
Protected EAP (PEAP) for the Authentication
For CA Certificate choose the verisign.pem that you saved OR choose /etc/ssl/certs/VeriSign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority_-_G5.pem
PEAP Version is Version 0
Inner Authentication is MSCHAPV2
Username is your NetID
Password is your NetID's password

It should connect. I've noticed some problems with my instructions of course. I usually have to type in this info every time. I think it may be because we're not specifying a certificate which the typical instructions state that you should do. Also if I restart or come out of hibernate, I will connect, it will fail and then I'd have to connect again and it would work. On rare occasions it will ask for LEAP password. Then I'd cancel it and try again and it would work.

maybe my gadgets are cursed

2008-11-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

For those of you who've read this blog for a long time know that at one point I bought an iAudio X5 and at another point a GP2X. Well, that was during the boom year, last year. Now that I'm in the recessed year, this year, where I'm back to being a broke student, I seem to have even more tales of somewhat sordid misfortune, gadget related or otherwise, than usual to put here on this blog. This post is no different.

Well, what happened?

I lost my iAudio in Six Flags in New Jersey.

And in typical ironic fashion, like the rest of my life, it wasn't during the roller coaster ride that it fell out of my pocket but right after I got off and was rushing to get back to the car because it was 10:00pm and Six Flags was closing.

I really liked that device. It would've made the 3 year mark in my possession. Now I'll never know how long it lasted. I'm worried more about my personal information than anything else though. I used to use the portable apps a lot when I had to use other people's computers in situations like in school labs and such. I don't really have to use them much but they were still on it. Of course I immediately started changing passwords on every website of mine. I had a master password in Firefox, but I still don't feel safe about it.

I did get a replacement device after awhile of doing without, but of course it had to be dirt cheap because I'm not a fancy salaried man anymore, so I got this 2gb Centon Movox. Whose Centon? *shrugs* I don't know, all I know is I wanted something that I could get ogg support for and a voice recorder to record lectures(like I ever listen back to them). I get that and an FM Tuner for $30 ?! I suppose that's what you get when you deal with a cheap chinese manufacturer.The only things that seem to come close is stuff from Sansa, but it's nothing that cheap.

I get what I pay for of course, the interface is awful. Fast forwarding also takes forever. The voice recorder records to wav, and I still haven't figured out how to export it to ogg yet. I get an error about unrecognized format in Audacity, even though it plays just fine in VLC. It also didn't come with a manual. For the longest while I didn't know that it had a tree-based folder view and thought just had to scroll from song to song. I only stumbled onto the feature later on. I had to download the manual from the site myself.

Now the GP2X, i haven't lost, but the joystick knob for it is another story. I'm standing on the train and I'm facing the door. I decide to pull out the GP2X from my pocket just as the door is closing in. As I pull it out the knob pops off of the little metal stick and goes flying out the door onto the platform, on the little strip with the little yellow bumps at the edge of the platform.Now I would've lept out of the train and gotten my knob back except I was already late for class and had to rush just to get to the train that I was on. The knob was already giving trouble and had been slipping off before. I guess it won't be doing that anymore.

My only point of contention was why was the knob slipping off in the first place? I have to admit that the GP2X hasn't aged very well at all. I knew going in that it would be inferior to the PSP but running hacks on the PSP would have been a much better value going forward that this device has been. My one gripe that I noticed was that it was missing wifi. After I bought it it worked well at playing videos, but the music player has some flaws, the main one being that fast forwarding takes much too long and sound quality is not that good. Also, a lot of the applications that people put out on it are not that good. A lot of the things that aren't emulators don't do what they were promised to do. Things like the PDF Reader for example. It is fun trying to get these things to work though and when Samurai Shodown worked that was epic.

The biggest problem has been that the stock kernel that has shipped out of the box doesn't have support for SDHC cards, so you could only put cards as big as 2GB in it. I did find a modified kernel that was supposed to have SDHC support, but it never worked for me. It had very alpha level card support. That has been the most major problem. I don't want to walk around with a bag of 2GB cards. Well I have a little collection of them now as a result and I'm going to sort through the applications to see which ones work and which ROMs for the emulators work and only walk around with those. In the meantime it's still a good video player and I still use it to watch podcasts regularly. The main impetus for getting this though was because it supported XviD and the PSP does that now, and the PSP also supports the ipod mpeg4 m4v files. *sigh* I look fuh dat, i suppose.

Weird Wireless Woes Part 3

2008-11-01T11:45:00.001-04:00

Well now that the first and second attempts at replacing wireless functionality in the laptop have failed, I gave it yet another try. My rationale this time was to buy one that used a different linux driver to work, and what could be more different than the Broadcom driver. I would then live in ndiswrapper land or bcm land. One or the other. So I bought this adapter by LevelOne, partly because I thought it was a Broadcom chip and partly because there was a $10 rebate at the time that effectively made it cost $5. How could you pass that up?

So I get it and what do you know it works! So it seems all is well. I was unsure at first because I only tried it once, then I tried it later on and it continues to work. It's using the RealTek 8187 driver.

Well that is until I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid, which is a whole other post. basically at this very moment it does not work anymore, or at least it appears not to. it still works on the same laptop on the vista partition so it can't be the usb stick itself, but who wants to use vista (actually I don't think Vista is bad, ssshh don't tell anyone, it's not great either but it'll grow on you when you're not looking) Especially considering the fact that it worked completely before the upgrade, it worked completely during the upgrade (when I explain how I upgraded, it'll seem even weirder) and after a reboot it doesn't, boggles my mind.

Miniscule Gnome Tip - Maximise a window in one dimension

2008-11-01T02:06:00.004-04:00

I have no idea whether or not you can do this in Windows or Mac, but in Gnome on Linux, you can maximise a window in one dimension if you choose. A left-click of a window's maximise button is a full maximise in both directions. A right-click of the maximise button will maximise in the x-axis, so it'll get wide and fill the screen that way and a middle click of the maximise button will maximise it in the y-axis, so it'll get tall like a column

edit: it may be a compiz thing. I don't know, I'm too lazy to check. All I know is I found it one day, so there

How to mount your home folder over ssh using sshfs in Ubuntu Hardy (and Intrepid I guess)

2008-10-31T19:08:00.005-04:00

ssh is secure shell. It's the thing people use to access their terminals remotely. There is this other thing called fuse, filesystems in userspace. It lets you run filesystems without having to compile kernel support for the filesystem into it. Then there's this thing called sshfs which is a fuse filesystem that lets you mount your home folder using ssh.

The only cool thing about that of course is that your router probably has an ssh port forwarded anyways (well not necessarily, but google 'setting up ssh' or 'port forwarding' first if you plan on doing this) so it makes it easy to access your files from anywhere on the net.

There are straightforward howtos here and there but i encountered some weird little caveats on Ubuntu Hardy like having to change permissions for stuff. so i thought i'd give another shot at this howto business.

Again don't blame me if your computer eats your turtle, but do reply in the comments to let me know if the howto smells a little funky.

To set it up here's the steps

Install sshfs

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

Add your user to the fuse group in order to run the fuse mounting app

$ sudo adduser $USER fuse

Give permission for regular users to mount sshfs shares

$ sudo nano /etc/fuse.conf
then uncomment the line user_allow_other, removing the # at the beginning of the line

Make sure that the fusermount and fuse.conf are in the fuse group

$ sudo chgrp fuse /bin/fusermount
$ sudo chgrp fuse /etc/fuse.conf

Next you need to run this command of the fusermount app itself. i think it sets the userid bit of it

$ sudo chmod 4755 /bin/fusermount

At this point logoff and log back on.

To actually mount the folder you use this command

$ sshfs -C -o allow_other -o follow_symlinks username@ssh-server-or-ip-address: /path/where/you're/mounting/the/folder

username would correspond to the name of the user on the sshserver
ssh-server-or-ip-address would correspond to just that.
/path/where/you're/mounting/the/folder also self explanatory

The -C is for compression. That's not strictly necessary.useful if you plan on accessing your sshserver over the net though
-o follow_symlinks is also not necessary, what that does is symlinks will show up as the actual file. so if you had a symlink that followed something outside of the home folder, it'll still show up as the file rather than just a dead symlink

look at man sshfs for other options

For example if ssh is running on a different port, there'd be a -p 1234
or if you want it to automatically reconnect once the connection lapses that's -o reconnect

One way of making it run on startup would be to just put it in the Sessions startup thingy in Gnome

System->Preferences->Sessions->Startup Programs->Add

Give it a name and paste in the command. Instead of just having sshfs, replace that with the full path of sshfs. so it'd be

/usr/bin/sshfs -C -o allow_other -o follow_symlinks username@ssh-server-or-ip-address: /path/where/you're/mounting/the/folder

edit: oh I forgot. There's another howto that's a dependency of the mount on startup feature. passwordless ssh logins. Normally when you mount it you have to enter the password in the ssh login in order to mount the home directory. well you need to give your login key to the ssh server in order to be able to run the command without a password. that way it can mount it on startup without having to put in a password, a necessity that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do on startup (or at least i don't know how to do it trivially)

On the machine you're running sshfs on run this command

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

it'll save the key to .ssh/id_rsa.pub . you want to copy the contents of that file to machine that you're logging into, into it's .ssh/authorized_keys2 file

$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remoteuser@remotemachineiporaddress:id_rsa.pub
$ ssh remoteuser@remotemachineiporaddress
$ cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 && rm id_rsa.pub

Once this is done you can ssh into the machine without entering a password and therefor you can mount sshfs shares on startup without having to enter a password.

anyways if you have port forwarding setup you can basically access your files anywhere with this. It is immensely awesome, and saying that it changed my life would not be overstatement. simple example is my music collection. I have almost 50gigs. I have an eeepc (talk for another post), with this i can access the whole collection and i didn't have to do much of anything to the server or the eeepc . it's pretty sweet.

Miniscule Linux Firefox Tip

2008-10-29T20:54:00.002-04:00

If you want to save a file in Firefox really quickly and the file isn't an html file, you can just click and drag the link into whatever folder you want to save it to. That includes the Desktop and any folder in Nautilus.

If you click and drag a link to an html file it will just produce a url link. This only seems to work in Linux, when I tried it in Windows, it just produced a url link regardless of whether it was a link to an html file or not

Miniscule Firefox Tip

2008-10-18T20:31:00.001-04:00

After you close a tab, you can undo closing the tab by right-clicking any other tab and choosing Undo Close Tab. Or you can press Ctrl+Shift+T

Weird wireless trials, Part 2

2008-10-18T20:28:00.003-04:00

Well I already talked about losing the wireless on my laptop. Well of course I'm not just going to sit there, I saved up for a bit and tried to get one of those PCI wifi cards to reinstate wifi powers in my laptop. Last time the other laptop lost wifi, I bought another PCI wifi card but it was a Linksys which used the Broadcom chip so while it worked I had to use ndiswrapper which was lame. ndiswrapper was cool of course but it's the principle. And then the card stopped working as well, presumably it also overheated (or the wifi fairies took it to a magical kingdom for wifi cards for all I know. I've no idea why my wifi woes are so arbitrary). So this time I google around to see which one works in Linux and find that the Edimax card uses the Ralink chipset for which there are open source drivers that work in Linux. So I get it. It doesn't work.

I turn around and try it in the old laptop whose wifi also doesn't work, and it works!! So I've inadertently reinstated wifi in the old laptop. Actually that old laptop is looking more and more useful again as time goes by. As long as I stick to XFCE and Xubuntu it works great. Too bad it's 7 pounds. But that doesn't help my actual laptop. So I turn around and buy the USB Edimax wifi stick. and it works. once. I plug it in and everything's great, and then I unplug it and plug it into the usb extension cord and then it stops working. I try it in the vista partition on the laptop and it doesn't work. It shows up in Device Manager but there's no network connection. I try it on the old laptop and it mostly works. It was usable but it couldn't see the full name of the wifi controller in network manager so something clearly was up. I try it in the gaming desktop and it shows up with the name but can't connect. So all very strange stuff going down.

I ask for a replacement at newegg. The first usb stick did seem a bit flimsy. Maybe I'll get a better one. I get it, try it in the laptop. no change. try on the gaming desktop and it works flawlessly! It's like I've added wifi to everything in the house except what I actually wanted wifi for.

So for now I wait. I'll probably get a different brand of usb wifi stick like another Broadcom one and see if there's a change. With the new Broadcom drivers and the maturity of the open source bcm drivers, it will probably be easier.

I get the following error messages in /var/log/syslog when I plug it in

device descriptor read/64, error -71

Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.508717] Time: hpet clocksource has been installed.
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.580344] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.605556] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.644724] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.663338] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 4 ports 1.5 Gbps 0xf impl SATA mode
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.663347] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq pm led clo pio slum part
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.663358] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.663737] scsi0 : ahci
Sep 29 15:45:24 cgl kernel: [   24.663973] scsi1 : ahci

lots of unknown symbols and a ieee80211_init: failed to initialize WME (err=-17)

Sep 29 17:06:03 cgl kernel: [ 1070.296702] usb 5-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.568076] usb 5-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl NetworkManager:  [1222722364.198364] nm_hal_device_added(): New device added (hal udi is '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_148f_2573_noserial').
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.696588] ieee80211_init: failed to initialize WME (err=-17)
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.721833] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_register_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.721941] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_tx_status_irqsafe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722081] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_ctstoself_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722133] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_start_queues
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722230] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_stop_queues
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722343] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_unregister_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722469] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_rts_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722520] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_beacon_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722631] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_register_hwmode
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.722687] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_rx_irqsafe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.723617] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_suspend
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.723668] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_probe_dev
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.723777] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_free_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.723827] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_alloc_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.723882] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_wake_queue
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724016] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_rxdone
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724183] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_remove_dev
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724252] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_txdone
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724302] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_write_tx_desc
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724400] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_stop_queue
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724450] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_get_hdrlen
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.724500] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_resume
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725083] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_add_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725133] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_get_stats
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725232] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_disable_radio
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725282] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_enable_radio
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725337] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_vendor_request_buff
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725412] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_write_tx_data
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725462] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_config_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725512] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_remove_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725562] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_vendor_request
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725611] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_probe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725661] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_config
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725711] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_write_tx_desc
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725760] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_suspend
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725810] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_conf_tx
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725860] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_start
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.725909] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_stop
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726009] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_disconnect
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726059] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_tx
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726121] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_erp_ie_changed
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726193] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_get_tx_stats
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726258] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_resume
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726308] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_uninitialize
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.726358] rt73usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_initialize
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.738298] ieee80211_init: failed to initialize WME (err=-17)
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.770811] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_register_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.771075] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_tx_status_irqsafe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.771423] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_ctstoself_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.771554] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_start_queues
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.771796] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_stop_queues
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.772077] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_unregister_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.772392] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_rts_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.772517] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_beacon_get
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.772807] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_register_hwmode
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.772947] rt2x00lib: Unknown symbol ieee80211_rx_irqsafe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.775067] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_suspend
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.775193] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_probe_dev
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.775463] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_free_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.775587] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_alloc_hw
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.775725] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_wake_queue
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.776059] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_rxdone
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.776474] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_remove_dev
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.776660] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_txdone
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.776784] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_write_tx_desc
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.777030] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_stop_queue
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.777154] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol ieee80211_get_hdrlen
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.777278] rt2x00usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_resume
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl NetworkManager:  [1222722364.452726] nm_hal_device_added(): New device added (hal udi is '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_148f_2573_noserial_if0').
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.778649] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_add_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.778774] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_get_stats
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779019] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_disable_radio
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779143] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_enable_radio
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779267] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_vendor_request_buff
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779390] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_get_ring
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779722] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_write_tx_data
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779846] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_config_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.779970] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_remove_interface
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780093] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_vendor_request
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780217] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_probe
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780341] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_config
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780464] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00lib_write_tx_desc
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780604] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_suspend
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780728] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_conf_tx
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780851] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_start
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.780974] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_stop
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781223] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_disconnect
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781347] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_tx
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781501] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_erp_ie_changed
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781680] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00mac_get_tx_stats
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781843] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_resume
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.781967] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_uninitialize
Sep 29 17:06:04 cgl kernel: [ 1070.782090] rt2500usb: Unknown symbol rt2x00usb_initialize

Miniscule Openoffice Tip

2008-10-18T19:55:00.003-04:00

When you select text, then press the Print File Directly button you have the choice of printing the whole document or just the selection. I thought it was an Openoffice.org 3 thing, but it's in 2.4 as well. A quick way to print part of a document

How does Linux recognise that drive when the BIOS doesn't?

2008-10-18T18:52:00.005-04:00

I have an old HP Pavilion 7850 in my house that serves as my home server. A place where I find an excuse to serve anything over the home network. I found it in the hallway in the house. My cousin had it and said that it wasn't working. Apparently Windows ME was just blue screening on it, apart from that it worked just fine. So apparently it must have just sat there for years not doing anything. So I take it and played with installing Linux distros on it at first. I tried Slackware which had an X misconfiguration in the version I installed, so all I got was command line. Needless to say I still haven't gone back to look at Slackware. I tried Fedora which was okay I suppose and OpenSUSE which was also okay but slow. It was only when I heard the Lugradio (I miss you guys! Bring the show back!!!) guys talk about it that I thought it might be a good idea to try out Ubuntu. Of course going on 3 years I'm still using it and don't plan on going back to anything else unless it's to 'try it out'.

In any case, somewhere in that time I began to set up the HP box as a home server. It would be the first time I try to do power user stuff with Linux. I went with Gentoo. Gentoo worked great and more importantly gentoo-wiki.com had stuff on it. So I used it for awhile. Then I accidentally wipe out have the var folder with a miswritten rsync command. It takes a week and a half to reinstall all the packages.

After that for some reason the drive moves incredibly slowly. I think all that reading and writing in the recompile of all those pacakages worsened the health of the mere 40giger considerably. So I get another old 20gig drive put Ubuntu on that, and make the 40 gig drive the /home folder. Of course the drive is still slow and 40gigs is laughable for a file server. So, it took awhile because I'm broke, but I get a 400gig drive for the machine. Install, format and mount it and it works fine. Except when I try to run Spinrite.

Spinrite would of course be the main sponsor of the Security Now podcast :) The first 15 minutes of the show is basically a Spinrite infomercial. Which is fine if it works, and he needs to eat. I didn't really need it of course, but back then I had a job and I'm a problematically compulsive shopper when it comes to electronics. That part is a whole other story. I try to run it and Spinrite doesn't see it. I e-mail Spinrite tech support and they say to check and see if the BIOS recognises it. It doesn't. Spinrite tech support suggests upgrading the BIOS. So I check the HP site and there are two BIOS upgrade download options, and the directions on their site for distinguishing the right one doesn't work here. I ask HP tech support to see which is the right one based on the serial no and they tell me. I try to install it and it still doesn't work. This entire journey of e-mail sending and searching and serial no. scribbling and floppy disk formatting brings me to the reaffirmation that this is an old-ass machine that doesn't support more than 80gig drives. tough noogies.

So this leaves me with three questions. How does Linux see the drive if the BIOS doesn't? I suppose it doesn't have to talk to ROM to interface with the IDE controller. Well, in any case 'Linux is awesome' is the lesson to learn from this ordeal.

The next question is why does Spinrite need the BIOS to see the drive if Linux doesn't? The answer of course is that Steve Gibson is a Microsoft guy, and Spinrite runs in DOS, booting off of FreeDOS, and DOS needs the BIOS to see the drive if Spinrite is going to see the drive. WHICH BLOWS!!! The only other option would be to either take the drive out and put it in my gaming desktop whenever I want to run Spinrite, which is a pain in the ass, or buy a pair of those removable drive trays which is a financial pain in the ass, especially as far as restraining my electronics shopping compulsion is concerned. You'll never hear Steve Gibson bring up that point in all those letters (Well it'd be silly if he did and he probably may have at some point, but it still sucks)

And the last question is, does Spinrite plan on supporting these drives in software? Are the mechanisms that it uses too low-level and thus need to have BIOS support? Will he ever move Spinrite off of DOS? Will it ever support large drives on old machines where there is no BIOS support? Spinrite wasn't cheap you know. With all its fancy algorithms I hope he puts that feature in the next release.

Silky smooth fonts in Ubuntu

2008-10-16T01:57:00.003-04:00

Okay, I just have to blog about this. If you use Ubuntu of any kind on an LCD screen, then you must go here and follow the instructions to turn on the full font hinting options. The difference is kinda dramatic. Apparently at least one of these options are not on by default due to patent stuff with Apple (I think, I really don't know) All I know is I'm staring at my text in webpages now for long swaths of time. It's kinda like looking at a show in HD. You know there's a difference that is extremely subtle but is nonetheless captivating for some bizarre reason. Just do it. Also if it looks a little weird, putting in less options in the .fonts.conf as detailed on Tombuntu should make give you another option as well.

Sky on the Amazon

2008-10-11T14:29:00.010-04:00

I like many other Trinis am a big fan of Orange Sky. Their latest album, Dat Iz Voodoo is now available on the Amazon MP3 store. It's basically Psycho World except it's more of an international release as far as where they're selling it. It also has some tweaks in the songlist. Dat Iz Voodoo is missing 2 songs that are on Psycho World: Your Arms and Three Bombs. I could do without Three Bombs so dropping that song was a good idea in my opinion. They could have kept Your Arms though. It also has one new song: Rainbows, and a rerecording of a song from Upstairs: Alone. Rainbows is very balladic so it distinguishes itself from the rest of the album in that respect. It's one of the better songs on it. Because of the better recording quality, Alone also sounds way better. Apart from that, everything that I said about Psycho World also applies to this release.

In any case, go to Amazon, buy the album if you don't have it. Buy the new songs, if you already have Psycho World. If you want the CD version, it's on Amazon as well, but rather expensive. In either case, you should put a review up for it.

You can also get the iTunes version (if you have iTunes that is. this ubuntu nerd doesn't) and it's the iTunes Plus version as well so no DRM, and it's same 99 cent price as all the other songs. I would put up a review there as well.

Also it's available from CDBaby if you want the physical copy cheaper than Amazon and from Starcity and Fizzkicks as well. Show some support, they're one of the few good bands we got left.

Help a MySQL Engineer's son

2008-09-28T14:46:00.003-04:00

BoingBoing reports that MySQL engineer Andrii Nikitin's son needs a bone marrow transplant. For the unfamiliar, MySQL kinda runs the internet. Most websites run using this database backend. We sorta owe him.

Flash 10 came out on Solaris? Cool

2008-09-26T21:40:00.002-04:00

The Flash 10 beta for Solaris came out today. I don't know whether Flash 9 came out on Solaris but it's cool that it came out for Solaris without much of a wait. It shows that their development methods really are as cross-platform as th promised. I wonder if it's coming out on the BSDs next, or maybe AIX or HP-UX? Well maybe not the last two.

Wow today is just not my day, not my year for that matter

2008-09-23T22:38:00.006-04:00

You know something has to going on, when I who hasn't posted in months, makes two random posts in a day.

Well I was a bit quick to open my mouth about LinkedIn. You can add the contact without their e-mail address, but only when you using the contact importer. When you use the suggestion feature in the sidebar to the right of your LinkedIn homepage it insists on the e-mail. It's funny because it found whatever emails I was looking for buried in Gmail somewhere even though I couldn't find it.

I live with relatives that are kind enough to put me up here for very little. It's in a small room though. I was cleaning out that small room today. I wanted to start putting some of this useless crap that I spent my money on last year (rather than being fiscally responsible and saving it) up for sale. So I start cleaning out and the room is a mess and my laptop is off, but opened up on the end of the bed. On the other end is the shelf(-like structure) where my books, and movies and such are located. Higher up on the shelf I was stacking old CDs with backups and such. I'm about finished and then I step down and klocks! The stacks of CDs, in their cases come flying off their perch, some fall to my right, one falls on my head, some fall to my left. The one falling to my left, bounces off the bed and hits the computer square on the keyboard, CRAKKZSS! Needless to say, I'm concerned. I take it aside, turn it on. No wireless. I reboot it into Windows. No wireless. The device shows up and Now I'm really concerned.

I reboot back into Ubuntu, and check to see that there's no wireless device in network manager or the manual network configuration applet. So now I'm in trouble. I check lspci and see this

03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)

so the hardware is seen, there's some error in bringing it up then. I check /var/log/syslog and find this

Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   29.926635] iwl3945: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection driver for Linux, 1.2.0
Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   29.926640] iwl3945: Copyright(c) 2003-2007 Intel Corporation
Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   29.926809] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   29.926824] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:03:00.0 to 64
Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   29.926848] iwl3945: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
Sep 23 22:02:28 christopher-gateway-laptop kernel: [   30.080397] intel_rng: FWH not detected

FWH not detected huh? When you google that error, a number of things come up, but none of them seem to say anything or provide a solution, they're just people confirming that error message.

What worries me about this is that it has happened before. And it wasn't software then, it was hardware, which basically means that its irreparable. I seem to remember blogging about this about my old laptop. My current laptop is a year old, and the previous incident happened a year into owning the other laptop, i think. And I was a broke student then and guess what? I'm a really broke student now.

I left it closed by accident one day and it was still on for awhile. It got hot, I turned it back on and then the wireless stopped working. although, the behavior was worse then. It was a Broadcom chipset using ndiswrapper. When that incident happened it would give me kernel panics in Ubuntu and blue screens of death in Windows. I seem to remember a couple of weeks ago, accidentally leaving my current laptop on before leaving for class and finding it on in my bag in class. I dont know if it started then or it started when a stacked off DVDs dropped it today, but either way...

I'm pissed.

I could punch someone in the face right now. I'm having school financial stuff and now this. I want to scream. In fact I have, many times for the day. Excuse me while I blow a dudes face off in Quake Wars.

LinkedOut

2008-09-23T14:48:00.003-04:00

I just wanted to say to the ether that is this blog, why is it so hard to add a contact on LinkedIn? It won't just let me do it. It insists that I know the person's e-mail address. What if it's an acquaintance from school whose e-mail address I don't know, and can't find because they take care to hide. Why have the recommendation feature if I can't use it?

How to install and setup web-based bittorrent client access with rtorrent, wtorrent and Apache in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

2008-09-18T17:58:00.017-04:00

I've spent a little while trying to figure this out so this is my first try at a howto. It's based off of this howto and this howto. Most of the other howtos explain how to set this up with lighttpd. It's been recommended to use this with lighttpd if you already have a web server running. I'm too ignorant to know why that is and didn't want to forward another port, so I tried to do with Apache instead. Please let me know if there's anything wrong with the howto in the comments. I'm barely an intermediate user as it is so the absence of a warranty goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways. Don't blame me when you type rm -rf / .

rtorrent is an text, nurses based bittorrent client. Works well for old machines and it's very fast, you can access it via ssh and such but web-based is nicer. It supports web-based access via xmlrpc through scgi. There are a couple web-based frontends written for rtorrent using this, like rtgui, rTWI, rtorstat and wTorrent. With it's AJAX interface, wTorrent is the nicest.

First things first, install everything that needs to be installed. These things are rTorrent itself, Apache, the mod-scgi and mod-php5 plugins for Apache, PHP, screen, unzip and sqlite.

$ sudo apt-get install rtorrent apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-scgi php5-cgi php5-common php5-sqlite php5-xmlrpc php5-curl sqlite unzip screen

Setting up rtorrent

You can run rtorrent with the rtorrent command. Check the user guide and the manpage for help on running it and setting it up. rtorrent uses a per-user configuration file called .rtorrent.rc in each users home folder so copy the sample to the user that you plan on running rtorrent as.

$ cp /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc ~/.rtorrent.rc

There are numerous options in this file. Many useful ones like saving state between sessions are detailed on the rTorrent site. One of the things detailed here is how to get rTorrent to run on startup. edit: [Okay, there is another option that you have to set in the .rtorrent.rc that I didn't know was mandatory when using the rtorrent init script. It's the session option which is detailed here . When you set it, it dictates the folder where you save the information that maintains the list of torrents when you close rtorrent. Once you do that, any torrents that were still running, will show up there again. It's not mandatory for rtorrent, but it is mandatory for the script. It makes sense obviously, that you'd want to have it maintain the list if you're gonna run it as a service.] It's kinda weird that that's an option that needs to be set in the first place, but I had it set before so it never gave me an error about it.

$ sudo wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/attachment/wiki/RTorrentCommonTasks/rtorrentInit.sh?format=raw -O /etc/init.d/rtorrent
$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/rtorrent
$ sudo update-rc.d rtorrent defaults
$ sudo nano /etc/init.d/rtorrent

Then change "user" in the line that says user="user" to the user that you want to run rtorrent as.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/rtorrent start

The init script runs rtorrent in a screen session on startup, so when you type rtorrent as the user you specified, you press Ctrl+A, D to detach the screen session and exit, but still leave rtorrent running. Next thing would be to enable the scgi (and international character support just in case) in rtorrent.

$ echo -e "\nscgi_port = localhost:5000\nencoding_list = UTF-8\n" >> ~/.rtorrent.rc

Then to enable the apache php and scgi modules, and configure the scgi module

$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled && ln -s ../mods-available/scgi.load && ln -s ../mods-available/php5.conf && ln -s ../mods-available/php5.load

edit: besides the above command, there's a better way to enable the scgi and php5 modules. It will check for dependent apache modules and let you know if there's configuration that needs doing. I don't know if it's Ubuntu only, but it is nice. Just type
$sudo a2enmod scgi
$sudo a2enmod php5

$ sudo echo -e "\nSCGIMount /RPC2 127.0.0.1:5000\n" >> /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

edit:[ If that last line doesn't work just open the file in an editor and add the SCGIMount line to the file

$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

then add this line to the end of that file

SCGIMount /RPC2 127.0.0.1:5000

]

Now to download and install wTorrent itself. I'm installing it a subfolder of the default web server root, only because I barely know what I'm doing and don't know how to do anything fancier like VirtualHosts. You can check here for some help on that.

$ cd /var/www
$ sudo wget "http://www.wtorrent-project.org/trac/changeset/latest/trunk/?old_path=%2F&format=zip" -O wtorrent.zip
$ sudo unzip wtorrent.zip
$ sudo mv trunk/wtorrent .
$ sudo rm -rf trunk
$ sudo mkdir wtorrent/tpl_c
$ sudo cp wtorrent/conf/sample.user.conf.php wtorrent/conf/user.conf.php
$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wtorrent
$ sudo chmod -R 755 wtorrent

Then to edit some wtorrent settings

$ sudo nano /var/www/wtorrent/conf/user.conf.php

Here you can edit a couple of settings. For example if you added a different port for apache, you have to edit the RT_PORT to the corresponding apache port. Most of the ones here that you care about will be editable from the web-based part of the installation. You could change them now if want though. You should change these though

define( 'DIR_TORRENTS',         'torrents/');
define( 'DIR_EXEC',                     '/var/www/');
define( 'DIR_DOWNLOAD',         '/home/rt/doing');

to whatever you really want them to be. Make sure that these folders are correct and have write permissions by the www-data user. Now to run the web-based install prompt. You this by going to the web server in your browser. The IP address can be gotten via ifconfig

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/wtorrent/install2.php

Change those to what you want and if it is successful, you must remove access to those install scripts. If you find that the changes you made didn't save you'll have to make the changes again by hand.

$ sudo mv /var/www/wtorrent/install.php /var/www/wtorrent/install.php.done
$ sudo mv /var/www/wtorrent/install2.php /var/www/wtorrent/install2.php.done
$ sudo chmod -x /var/www/wtorrent/install*

FINALLY, you can access the site via http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/wtorrent/ . You log in with the login info you gave in install2.php. If it doesn't work try the default my_user, my_password, then once you're logged in create a new user and delete the old one.

There is one thing to note, in the wtorrent I installed, the DIR_TORRENTS variable in user.conf.php can't accept absolute folder paths, only relative ones, so in that case, just make a symbolic link in the torrents folder of wtorrent pointing to where you really want to put it. Specify "torrents/the-symbolic-link-to-the-folder/" in user.conf.php. Then when you want to upload a torrent file just type torrents/the-symbolic-link-to-the-folder in the place where you want to save it and it should be fine. OR you can avoid all of that and just save your torrents in the torrents folder inside wtorrent, but that's up to you.

Again please let me know of any problems with the howto

Westwood Park available for download

2008-05-14T14:26:00.003-04:00

I'm at home right now. Sick with a wretched little bug: sore throat, fever, aches, coughing. It's the week-long break in between the spring and summer semesters. I'm sitting at home going through the google reader news items that I haven't touched in ages. There I found the CFR link to the downloadable Westwood Park Season 1 episodes. You can watch it for free with ads or rent each episode for 99c. I remember I followed a link awhile ago for the Season 1 DVD set that came out. I got it back when I was working and just let it sit there. I finally watched it a few weeks ago. It was during the exams when I was up late and not feeling great about how my work was going and checked out an episode instead.

Westwood Park, based on watching the first season is completely off-the-wall ridiculous and crazy. In the beginning the comess took a little while to get going but I suppose it was necessary to make it keep going for a long time. You could also tell that it was because a lot of the plotlines had built in conclusions that were to be paid off much later in the season. But once it does get going which was about midway in the season, I just couldn't stop giggling. Noone's daughter is legitimate in this show. They'll have a plot twist and then another, then when you least expect it they'll give you another, seemingly arbitrarily. I don't see other soap operas where dudes are getting kicked in the crotch or alcoholics are visiting obeah women or maids are pulling out chinese choppers on ministers of the government! (so awesome!) It's hilarious, and a little bit campy, as if the filmmakers were just delighted with the fact that they managed to convince ANYBODY to let them make a local tv series of any kind much less what they were committing to film.

Which leads me to the acting. umm... completely all over the map. Some characters like the Gunnmonroe father are okay but some of the children are terrible. And don't talk about the screaming. You just have to bust out laughing at any actor's scream. I wonder for a bit if it's just the sing-song nature of the accent that makes it hard to seem sincere or Trinidad's acting talent just needs practice.

There are a few other problems with the show. Once I saw a boom mic dip into the shot for a second. The editing, especially early on in the season, is not particularly good. There was a scene in a restaurant that they just cut away from, just so. I barely figured out what was going on and then they cut away from the other scene back to the restaurant. 'huh? what the hell's going on?' I didn't even know I could recognize bad editing till I saw that. Once the baccahnal gets rolling you can forgive the rough edges though.

Also many of the plot twists can be seen 500 MILES away. I don't know if that was intentionally written to be so, to start debate when people are watching the show, but it is what it is I suppose. It doesn't matter when the plot twists get to be as ridiculous as they are here. You still buss out laughin at the reveal.

Oh and there are HOT women on this show. As I write that sentence I just realised that that's a requirement of a soap opera, but it's still definitely met in this rendition.

Guilty pleasure or not, you should still check it out. If only just to support endeavours such as this. My mom never let me watch it because she thought all that drama was too much schupidness. It is, but that's what makes it so great.

This just in. I still exist.

2008-04-14T01:31:00.002-04:00

For all 12 of you that once read this space, hello. I'm on twitter now. I always had an account but thought it was stupid. I still think it's stupid, but it's quicker than really blogging. Does anyone really want to know that my cat slept on my lap on a Saturday afternoon? (Oh and I have a cat now) I say that, but I'm following Chris and Bryan from the Linux Action Show and one of them mentioned going for Thai food, and I just had this guttural sensation 'hmm, I could go for some Thai food' Thai food on a Friday was a regular semi-regular ritual when I used to work, which I don't anymore. I had to leave because of the rules. visa rules that is. I went back to school as a result. What a bad idea that's turned out to be. I'm 22 years old and I'm not ready to do a Masters degree. Saying that it has been difficult is a colossal understatement.

In my ideal world, I will have gotten 5-7 years of work experience, with half of that being software development experience. By that time I'll be experienced in Java, C++, Perl and Python. None of this has happened. Basically, I know a little bit of Linux, a chinky bit of Solaris and AIX. I know some enterprise backup applications, I understand iSCSI and Fibre Channel a bit, umm... I know some QA process and that's it. I do have a home server in my house doing some basic services, ftp, ssh, nfs and whatnot, but I'm barely starting to scratch the surface on that.

Back in the real world however I hurried and rushed down starting back school. It has been NOTHING but a headache. I'm tired all the time. I'm not doing well in class. I'm actually doing really poorly. As time goes by, my motivation for working on this dwindles steadily. It's been a pretty expensive mistake.

Do we realise that a Trini was in 40-year old virgin?

2008-01-06T02:45:00.000-04:00

Because Mooj is a Trini named Gerry Bednob. If you're not sure which one is Mooj first of all go watch it, second he's the one telling someone to go fuck a goat. I know that it was pretty obvious that he was but it's just that I'm sitting here watching the Knocked Up DVD extras and he's in that and it reminded me to check again to be sure. Whenever you see an island person on TV or something you always doubt and think that it's one of the other islands, a Jamaican or a Bajan, Antiguan or Guyanese or something. Not this time.

And in one of the classics. Well stoner classics at any rate. That still counts, right? I remember watching that movie with friends for thanksgiving. That was fun. A trini in THE 40-year old virgin. nice.

What's the calypso doing on the mtv?!

2007-12-29T23:27:00.002-04:00

I went to the shipping center today to mail this expensive drill that my dad made me buy months ago but which I was always too lazy to actually mail for him. They had this television playing mtv. I wasn't paying attention but then I heard old time calypso coming out of it. I was like "What's the calypso doing on the mtv?!" It was a live performance by a british singer named lily allen. It had this old-time kaiso riff that was sampled. It was a good song. LDN it was called. Then the hater in me came out and thought, why don't they put a Trini girl on the tv singing off a calypso beat like that. I don't think too many Trini acts are playing with the calypso in interesting and refreshing ways like that, at least there aren't many that I've seen. Skid Nevely would be the closest thing that comes to mind, and considering that, without saying they're a clone, they're heavily inspired by blink-182, they just win by default. At the same time, I haven't been looking for new music. My mind has been in work and nothing else, but that's another story. When was the last time I wrote in this blog again?

edit: Amazon released a Linux version thus invalidating this whole post :) Well done Amazon.

So I get home and I think that I'm going to buy their album. I checked Amazon for it since I recently downloaded the I <3 Miro firefox extension that lets me support the Participatory Culture Foundation by invisibly setting Amazon purchases to them as the affiliate. I wholly recommend that you download and use it on your computer. It's no skin off your back. Even if you don't care about free software, It's like being charitable whilst not.

Anyhow I see that Amazon has their mp3 store and think, well the only reason I buy a CD in the first place is because it's DRM-free, so I might as well try this. Lo and behold to get the advertised price for the album you have to download and install their Amazon who-gives-a-shit downloader which is Windows and Mac only. What kinda fucking bullshit is that? For me one of the main reasons I want drm-free music is to access it from anywhere including all my 4 computers in the house which are all running Ubuntu. You can purchase each song individually which puts it at $4 more than the mp3 or physical version. Amazon better flicking put out a linux version or open source the downloader or put out an api or do some shit if they want me to use their mp3 store. Which is a shame because I'd much rather be able to use it that than buy CDs.

And no I do not want to poke at wine to make it work. I did double click the installer to see what happened in wine though. It ran but then X crashed. I think that could be an Ubuntu thing. I'll talk on that later I suppose. Fortunately according to Wine HQ's app db, it says that a Linux version is under development, but right under that is a complaint that it's just vaporware, so there you go. The linux version of an app that sits right next to the linux version of Joost and the linux version of Pownce which is to say, non-existent.

The mp3 version was cheaper but not that much cheaper so I end up buying the album and a Python book so I can cross that beloved $25 free-shipping threshold. The Amazon filler item finder is very useful for that sort of thing. Can't tell you how many crossover cable adapter I've bought that way. Somehow I always end up spending more. I'm very bad at not spending money.

I take another listen and the song is actually really depressing, but her other single has a less than cheery attitude like this one. Happy isn't really all that interesting anyhow. I really haven't listened to much new music lately so she seems new to me even if she is mainstream.

Only in New York I suppose

2007-10-21T21:53:00.000-04:00

If anyone wants to know why I deleted the last two posts, it's only because I learn time and time again not to assume that noone's reading this. As I've recently learnt that's obviously not the case. So drunken rants and complaining about being single are not a good idea. I think I'll setup another blog for that. In any case, it's not going to matter since rss readers don't know anything about deleting posts, so too little too late.

Anyhow, I was on the train the other day, long island railroad, not the subway, and it was one of those evening trains that are packed with people, usually white kids going to party. So I sat down and it was one of those pairs of rows of seats where they faced each other.

The other people who sat down over the course of the trip were this pretty douglah indian woman who I could see was quite obviously a trini, a white nerdy looking guy in a suit, and a polynesian looking lady. The asian lady was an older woman wearing a nurse's uniform and she took out a book with writings in a language that looked like it was out of a fantasy novel. She began to recite what was written down. I asked her what language it was. She said it was Tibetan. It was a Tibetan prayer book.

A little while later, the white guy spoke and asked the indian woman where she was from. She said she was from Trinidad. I then said me too, and the trini woman was quite surprised. 'You're from Trinidad??' Up to now I still wonder why Trinis can't figure out that I'm from Trinidad. What's the deal with that? She asked me where I was from: St. James. She said she was from El Dorado, which made me think holy crap I've forgotten where El Dorado is. That's bad. I've been here too long.

The white guy said, referring to the trini lady said "your skin colour's darker than his" i said there are lots of different complexions in Trinidad. After being asked, he said he was originally from Ohio.

So we have two Trinis, a Tibetan and a guy from Ohio, sitting cramped on this packed train. Sounds like the start to a bad joke. Only in New York I guess.

I never saw people that aren't black talk like that

2007-08-26T12:53:00.000-04:00

I was reading The Junction Blog where soyluv was commenting on islanders in America, at the end of it the first thing that struck me was the sentence 'Can you recite the National Pledge?' only because I realised that I've wholly and completely forgotten the National Pledge. 'I solemnly pledge... uhhh...' I had to ask Google what the pledge was. It reminded me of school days saying it for assembly as we stood in our organized lines in the yard, first thing in the morning. Standing in front of Miss Phillips, our principle, looking very proud with her clean dress-suit and way too much makeup on we would rattle off the pledge like it was penance. It was always uttered flawlessly only because we said it the same way the day before and the one before that. It never meant anything to us at the time though. It was simply a matter of us following direction, an objective that our educational system was very good at, if nothing else. Come to think of it, I don't remember any discussion about the pledge in class either. Looking at the Google search results, I see little in it that is held in high regard by my people, if the Express or Newsday news feeds are any indication.

As for representing your country of origin, I see it as my implicit right that I think would be against my best interests not to exercise, especially in a diverse place like New York, reasoning being that I'm one of those 'mixed' people of ambiguous racial nature. I sport a strange conglomeration of facial features, mongoloid and negroid, that always has people confused. No, I'm not from Indonesia, Thailand, Madagascar, Mexico or Venezuela, ~~although I wouldn't mind a girl from any of those lands~~. And stop talking to me in Spanish. How else am I gonna clear this up except with a badge on my bag? And the Trinis are no different. There are so many times that I've noticed Trinis sorta twitch in realisation when I answer my phone on the train, and hear a Trini accent belted out.

America is very diverse, but it's very divided. Either you're one race or the other. It's not yet gotten used to mixed races. I remember I was at a picnic, and there were Trinis from home, half-Chinese, Syrian, White, Spanish. A black girl from California, said that she thought it was interesting to see people who weren't black talk like that. I was not included in that statement, implying that I was black. Obviously they were just as mixed up as me, but my complexion just managed to tip the scales. So in this land it was okay for me to say 'nigga' but not okay for them. And that would be why I 'have flava' according to someone from work. And why it's somehow a little weird to some people that I like rock music.

So if they say I'm a negro, I might as well find a compromise because 'I’m not just another American negro, I’m a Trini one so they better recognize'.

Although I will say people should only really be allowed to overdo it on Labour Day or other respective day of representation, because otherwise you just look like a wanker, regardless of whether you're a Boricua or Yardi or Trini.

What's cowskin soup?

2007-08-25T23:31:00.000-04:00

With respect to the episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern where he went to Trinidad, what de hell is cowskin soup? It was nice to see a bit of T&T marketing that didn't involve Carnival though

As I step on the cracks in the pavement, they've been there since I was a child...

2007-07-29T15:54:00.001-04:00

It can be really hard to find Trinidadian alternative music online. I have no method on finding out whether the rare occasion that an artist can afford to produce an album is also accompanied by some sort of online selling mechanism. Especially rock bands. I usually hope that one puts their stuff on cdbaby, even though they may not get that much money from cdbaby. The only other option is rhyners.com or trinidadmusicstore.com. I HATE buying anything off trinidadmusicstore.com. Basically every time I buy something off the site, I get a Microsoft OLE SQL DB error at some point in the process, and the site's ugly as ass and the CD takes forever to reach Brooklyn. I suppose the last part is TTPost's problem. I haven't tried buying off rhyner's yet, although like Trinidadmusicstore their prices are exorbitant. It's like buying CDs marked as Imports off Amazon. $25 for a CD?! Trinihits has a poor selection as well, only Soca and not much of it.

In any case I decided to brave Trinidadmusicstore to buy Orange Sky's next album. Of course I get a MS SQL DB Error at some point and after I bought it, I get an apology e-mail two weeks later basically saying that they forgot to send the CD, and that they're only now mailing it. Ridiculous. Ofcourse it took 2 more weeks to get here.

Orange Sky is rally vexed this time around with Psycho World. With Trinidad in the state that it's in there's a lot to be vexed about. There's a lot of political commentary to be found in this offering laying out what's in a lot of people's minds.

The recording quality is much better this time around. The guitars just sound much better, with a lot more bass. I didn't realise it at first but the quality of Upstairs was not that great. My only complaint with Psycho World is how loud it is. I assume it's that way so it'll sound good on crappy headphones, but the blaring of it is a bit much by the time the last song plays.

The music definitely achieves that wall of sound that they wanted for Upstairs. It's definitely rock. It still manages to maintain the core of Sky's style, but they don't dance between genre's as much. I liked when they did. It gave them variety, but most of the songs here do fit a rocking soundtrack.

It starts with Yesterdays & Tomorrows basically stating that our political leaders are the root of our evils. It let us know where the CD was headed and the quality of the songs don't deviate much. The next song, Run expands the discussion to how our society in general is stressful for us. The discussion expands further with Three Bombs, Psycho World and The End. My favorite is The End. I like the biblical allusions between T&T's so-called development and omens of the times, but I think some might not. There is the usual Orange Sky fare with great songs like Second Wind and Is There Anybody There? reminding us that the only thing all Trini men want in this life is a sweet Trini woman. IMHO the serving of guitar solos is a bit lighter than in Upstairs which I didn't like.

All in all a great purchase.

I don't care how bad the acne is, dammit.

2007-07-29T15:11:00.000-04:00

I have been trying as of late to get my lip fixed. You may or most likely may not remember last year I posted on how I busted my lip wide open. It was bad. Well I didn't go to the hospital partly because I didn't have insurance and party because I think my Aunt and her son couldn't be bothered to take me to the hospital. It's been a year and I starting to grow more and more resentful about that, even though they may not realize what happened. Why? Well, I suppose because of the nature of the way that I busted my lip, it formed a lump on the inside of it. It's scar tissue, and it may not be going anywhere for the rest of my life. That's bad. Many people don't seem to understand what I'm trying to say when I explain it. It's like having a foreign object inside of your lip. I feel it ALL the time. It's affected the flexibility of the whole lip. It's uncomfortable to move my lip at all. Smiling... puckering umm pretty much any facial expression that requires that I move my lower lip at all is unpleasant. I've learnt to live with it somewhat but not really. And the skin where the busted part was will peel periodically. Also really bad.

In any case. I made the decision to see about it, especially since the employer has insurance coverage that's basically full. At the current point in my journey about this, I saw a plastic surgeon last Friday. I don't know if I wrote the wrong thing down on the form but he seemed to think I was concerned about how it looked. Then he went on this tangent about my acne, and gave me a prescription for it! Then he said I needed braces! WTF?! I don't care how it looks! It's how it feels, It's slowly driving me crazy! He said there was something that could be done about my face, and to call him back about it in 2 weeks, then mentioned in passing that if he cut it open there would still be a scar. I think he's missing the point. Is he talking about a scar on the outside which I don't care about, or less scar tissue on the inside which is basically what i want? He must have misunderstood me and I didn't realise that he was misunderstanding me at first. I left the place realising a slew of different ways to explain it to him that hadn't occured to me before.

I wonder whether his reaction to my face is indicative of the general female reaction. Is that all it's going to take to supposedly turn things around for me? If that's the case then women must be really shallow then. Somehow I doubt it's just that.

I had missed work that morning to go to this doctor's office and I took the lirr back to work. As the train was coming into the train station in Jamaica, it suddenly stopped. hmm. then a few minutes ticked on and the conductor announced that they found a suspicious package in the station and that all train traffic was stopped into and out of the station. Just what I needed to follow the news I heard that morning. And this went on for an hour. An hour of just sitting there in this cold train. Stupid trains in New York don't seem to have any thermostat in them. It's either off and muggy and humid or on full blast like an Arctic storm. And of course there was waiting in the station once they let it up and hour and a half later then the train to transfer to was packed to the brim.

In any case I'm definitely going to call another plastic surgeon. and another. and another. until I can find one who can cut this thing out once and for all.

Coupling

2007-07-29T13:44:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I've mentioned this on this blog, but I got Netflix now. I think Netflix is one of if not the greatest aspects about this country, right next to having fast internet. The idea is brilliant. I've seen or will see stuff that would be a huge pain in the arse to acquire otherwise, especially British television and Asian movies.

I'm watching Coupling Series 2 right now. Anyone whose seen any good British series will tell you how amazing British TV can be. This show is hilarious. Imagine Friends, except all they talk about is sex, and it's MUCH funnier. The writing is really good. The Jeff character is the funniest albeit somewhat horrific as well. Funny in that he has all these theories about women but no evidence to back it up. Horrific is the thought that that might be me when I turn 30. That brings to mind the thought that there's a studio audience watching all my indecision with either terrible boredom or uncontrollable giggling.

I can remember tv6 had Coupling at home for a little while. I don't know why I didn't get into it then. I'm downloading the 10 episodes of the short-lived American version, just to see how bad they are compared to the British version.

Pownce Invites

2007-07-29T11:41:00.000-04:00

I have 6 pownce invites. Someone e-mail me if you want one. If I know you, you're obviously more likely to get one. Pownce incidentally is the worst Web 2.0 name of the more popular services that have popped up. I thought it was pronounced poe-nced. I still instinctively say poe-nced. The service in general is worthless to me, because something like that which is similar to IM relies on network effects and virtually noone I know uses it. But I'm a geek, and don't know too many folks. It's also meant to be a kind of file transfer focused IM microblogging thingamabob so they put out a desktop client but the linux version isn't out yet. therefore useless at the moment.

Which reminds me microblogging is a huge mystery to me. Why would anyone blog and microblog? It's more work. I'm not that important or self-absorbed either to think that anyone needs to know that much about me. I'm not that interesting. Also how can anyone get any work done if they insist on choosing whether they want other people to know what they're doing every step of the way.

Amazon 'inspired' by the Beryl Ring Switcher plugin?

2007-07-18T22:09:00.000-04:00

I was shopping at Amazon today and and found this little app. I saved it

But it also reminded me of this

interesting...

More than meets the yippie kayaying muthafucking eye!

2007-07-07T18:17:00.000-04:00

I saw Transformers last night. Everyone must see this movie. It's like required reading. I can't fully describe how amazing it is to see Transformers actually on the screen, in front of you. Well, everyone should know about Transformers, they're robots that transform from cars to robots and back. It was a set of Hasbro toys that got turned into a cartoon, and comics that defined our generation's existence (well not really, but close). The movie is directed by Michael Bay of Armageddon and Bad Boys fame. That was the best thing and the only problem in the movie at the same time. I guess they got him to do it since it was important that this movie be summer popcorn-ish to get people to come see a movie about talking robots. To that end the movie gets gears moving at a good pace. The action is Bay-level good as well.

Once Optimus Prime started talking, my face melted. Every scene with the Autobots and the Decepticons, who only showed up in the end, melted my face. The only problem was the human characters which with, the exception of Shiloh LeBouf all belonged, in either Armageddon or Bad Boys and not in this movie. It was cute at first, but it became increasingly groanier and groanier, worse and worse as the movie went on. Fortunately the real stars were the robots and it works. I did have fears about the movie since their faces didn't look humanoid enough. That to me is an important part of the Transformers is that they can emote even though their robots. Their complicated looking faces still manage to do this though. Especially Optimus.

The other fear was how complicated the robots look, they didn't look like the 80s cartoon at all and they had all this weird parts moving about. I thought it would make it difficult to empathize with them if they looked all weird. In the 80s cartoon they were blocky so they were basically human looking. Well these fears are also availed in the film although they did go a bit overboard with Optimus. Sometimes you had no idea what the hell was going on with him when he transformed.

In the end though all you need to hear is 'Autobots rollout!' and your face will melt as the best parts of your childhood zoom past your eyes.

Oh and I saw Live Free or Die Hard. Guaranteed to make anyone who works with computers groan. Other than that John McClane is a badass. and the Mac guy was actually good. It definitely met the Die Hard movie qualifications.

July 4th

2007-07-07T17:22:00.001-04:00

Okay, so America had this holiday that just passed, Independence Day, the first public holiday in about 2-3 months. Far too long in my opinion. Back home we be having a holiday regular regular every month like clockwork. So I thought I would do something on this day. I remember reading about the American premiere of the film Yo-Yo Girl Cop at the NY Asian Film Festival on BoingBoing. With a name like Yo-Yo Girl Cop you can bet your bottom dollar, I'm there.

Wow, so much cheese... Directed by the son of the guy that directed Battle Royale (which I haven't seen but which I hear is a must). It's a film about an underage (the subtitles made a point of using this word at least once in the film) secret special agent (female of course) cop whose been commissioned to infiltrate a school that's been affected by a web-based suicide bombing terrorist cult (that's lesbian sorta). She's been blackmailed (or extorted ? one or the other) to do this so she could clear the record of her poor illegal immigrant mom in NY who was a special agent as well, but ran to NY and is about to be deported. Oh and she's been equipped with a yo-yo as her weapon.

Now, if you could process that paragraph, then you'll love this. If there's any anime that you've ever seen, there's always that moment where they say something completely weird, that you hope was because of the translation but you know couldn't have been. This movie was filled with off-putting moments like that. Not to mention fight scenes with yo-yos, bad guys with fantastic hair, usually more than one head of hair. It touches on how adolescent children are usually faced with authority figures that don't seem to understand them. Mostly it was about seeing this young girl hit people in the face with a yo-yo. Awesome.

Then I went to a party in Brooklyn. A backyard fete. I read on the 3canal mailing list that they were going to be performing in NY on the 4th and got a ticket for it. I didn't realise that it would be an actual fete. I didn't exactly know what it would be, though I was leaning more towards the posh perform in a restaurant/bar sorta thing. That was silly of me. I didn't want to go to an actual fete since I knew me going by myself would basically equate to standing against the wall wishing I was home. That is sortof what happened. Drinks were way expensive ($5 US for Shandy?!) and even though I tried to show up to just see 3canal perform, they only sang an hour after the ticket person said they would be up. So there was a lot of me wishing I was less sober and quietly headbobbing. There was this white dude with this smoking hot Asian chick. They were obviously not island people, but all I could think was, I wish had a smoking hot Asian girlfriend, but then again, who doesn't? There were a lot of late-twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings there. I felt like I was a kid surrounded by old people, at my big sister's (if I had one) party. Some very pretty old people but nonetheless..

3 canal finally did play though and that was amazing. umm.. No other way to put it, t'was great. I did wine on one person jus so. That person didn't like it I suppose and moved away right afterwards. Once 3 canal was done I made a quick retreat and tried to go see Transformers, but no go.

Since they took so long with 3canal, I missed the time that I wanted to see it. It opened that day so basically everywhere it was sold out. I tried to instead go to another cinema in Brooklyn but that only proved my point. As I walked in the empty Brooklyn streets I could see and hear fireworks exploding nearby. I tried to go another cinema in Manhattan instead and it wasn't showing there, and at that point I gave up and went home. A good choice since I had work in the morning.

's been awhile

2007-06-30T10:12:00.000-04:00

wow. what is this? Oh wait, I remember now. I have this thing they call a blog on this website they call blogger. Ah clean fuhget. Well more accurately, I've been very busy. These days I'm using up the OPT part of the student visa, testing software at this software firm in Long Island. I think that I should have been recording those days, as they are the most interesting but I guess I was lazy. I also stopped doing this certification that I was doing. It was just too much for me. I have to say that with all this work, I can actually afford stuff now, and I do, a little too much perhaps, but I haven't really enjoyed my spare time.

First off, there's such little time. I basically leave the house at 7 and get back at 9 everyday. I still don't have many new friends. I don't lime with work people at all outside of work, and considering everyone there is some level of geek, I may be better off that way. That's the thing that really gets me. I'm much too reserved to survive on my own in a foreign place. I need some social interaction, but I'm somehow ill-equipped to seek it out. The only liming I've done is with existing friends who came to visit New York. That's gonna be bad for me wherever I go, whether it be New York or Trinidad or anywhere else. I'm not happy.

I have bought a lot of crap though. A lot of music, and PC games. I bought a Wii, GP2X, Trekstor Vibez for my sister, and I built a new gaming rig. I have saved money as well, but it obviously would be more if I didn't buy all that stuff. I think it was just to distract me from the fact that I spend all this time by myself and not with friends. The only things I want by the end of the year, will be a new camera or a dvcam and one of those Dell laptops running Ubuntu. I'll save the rest but I really should learn to spend wiser (or not want so much gadgets, guess that's the geek curse)

Speaking of the end of the year, I may just wind up going back home by the end of the year since that's when the OPT expires. I didn't see about a H1B visa in time, and the next deadline's year starts at some ridiculous time next year (October), so even if I get it at the very least I'll be spending some months at home, and probably won't be able to come back to the same job. Everyone jokingly or seriously suggests some shady stuff to stay here. I don't know if I'll do any of that.

I'm gonna try and blog regularly again though, periodically looking back at stuff and looking forward. I'm back in all my rambling glory.

Someone please digg this!

2007-03-30T22:24:00.000-04:00

I was just reading the West Indies Cricket Blog, where I found the story covering a little Microsoft visit to Antigua. Went to add it to digg, only to find the story there already. Please digg this. It's too great not to be dugg.

blab blah blah

2007-03-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

I just got the Westwood Park Season 1 DVD. Haven't looked at it yet. I'll go into it in more detail later. Just put it in the laptop and got this:

Okay that deserves +1000 cool points of some sort

Buss meh lip, epilogue

2007-02-26T10:34:00.000-04:00

I think I wrote about my having buss meh lip back in August. I never did go to the hospital to see about it. Turns out I should have. Two weeks into it having healed, a lump formed in my lip. It was scar tissue. I didn't know that then. I hoped it would go away. It hasn't. As time was passing, I would harass my Aunt about it but she wouldn't take me on, she would say that there was nothing to worry about. I hoped to resolve to go only when I was in a position where I wasn't nervous about insurance. I was obviously procrastinating. One day I mentioned it as work. They had a good chuckle over the fact that I fainted. I got really flustered about it, but in a light-hearted fashion. That was the last straw though, when they said, oh that's scar tissue, it'll be there forever. So I went to the Hospital yesterday and the doctor told me the same thing. She stuck a needle in my lip to be sure. So now there's a lump in my lip and it's never going away. ever. fuck. fuck fuck fuck. What gets me is the fact that everyone seems to make light of the situation, but they have no idea how uncomfortable it is. I feel aware of it every waking moment of the day. It drives me crazy. I want nothing more than to be rid of it. Everyone compares it to a situation that they've encountered, except in all those situations, it involved their extremeties, their arms or fingers. This is my bloody bottom lip! There's more nerve endings on your face than anywhere else on your body. I suppose because it's completely healed on the outside that they don't realise that I feel it since it doesn't look like it. I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to save up and get plastic surgery to cut it out. I'm completely irrational for thinking this, but I kinda (somewhat childlishly) resent my Aunt for not having let me go to the hospital, since I needed the stitches on the spot. Hot compress kinda helps, but I would wake up in the morning and find it right back where it started. When it does help, the compress would dry out my lips, so I have a stratchy lump or dry peeling lips. *grumble* It twitches all the time, and I'm always annoyed by it. It's insidious. Arrrghhh. steups.

Ah get boof up

2007-02-22T13:24:00.000-04:00

I got reprimanded last week. Or as we Trinis, say, I get boof up. (Is that how boof is spelt? It's not really pronounced like that, it's somewhere between buf and boof with a little bit of bouf. Trinis have a funny way of pronouncing our u's and o's. They kinda blur together) He was asking my progress on something and I thought I was moving along really well. But it didn't sound much like that when I laid it out. He went into a little speech, talking about what it takes to keep up here. It was kinda like being 9-years old and getting boof up for getting low marks in a test. In those days the teacher made it sound like Common Entrance exam at the end of primary school was where life ended and the exam was an appraisal of your performance to determine whether you went to heaven or hell. Life of course trudges on so you're outlook after adolesence determines whether its hell or not. The only difference from that was I was pretending to be an adult this time. He was very good at the boof up though. He made full use of dramatic pauses, and had a condescending drawn out drawl meant to strain the worth out of every statement. Afterwards it felt like getting rejected in a job interview. I'm sure I blogged about that in excruciating emo-esque detail. I had a similar reaction to that occasion. I realise that I react physiologically (or somatically or whatever) to this kinda stuff. I literally felt tired afterwards, and wanted to go to sleep. The sleep wasn't good and I felt beat up once I woke up.

I'm sure there was some method to his approach. But I don't think it works as well as it should. I will admit, I had been spending a bit too much time on digg.com so I deserved some or most of it, and I won't be heading to Google Reader for some time (especially since I may be able to afford my own Internet), but still. Now I don't think I can be frank with him, because I don't have the skill to back up what I say, if he says something that throws me off. I'm not sure I want to ask him questions either, again because of his intense-ness. I'm straight-up afraid to talk to him now, because I don't want my otherwise good day turn horrible. I'm pretty sure a good manager, should make you feel happy to work and productivity should come implicitly from that.

Once I got my first paycheque, it was a bittersweet moment. On the one hand it felt wonderful to afford some new pants. and some toilet paper. On the other hand, I thought how long would this last? Am I cut out for this? This being the IT industry, working in America. The long hours, working under 'intense' people. How long would I be getting this cheque? Am I gonna be broke and jobless again? What do I have to do in order to stay relevant? It's hard when I'm in this position where my school sucked arse, I really don't have many skills or experience, and the environment is so competitive. And then there's the characters you have to work for. I can remember one interview where I was late. It was a really nice place to work, Park Avenue, they had an elaborate training program. The hours were bizarre, but who cares. But I just knew that my being about 10 minutes late was what killed it. Why is that such a big deal? I hate it all.

I guess I have to just try for awhile. I'm supposed to get evaluated in three months. So in the short term at least, it'll be nice to afford some Listerine. The guy I was sitting next to said that the chair that I sit in has a bit of a curse on it. For a while all the people that have ever sat in it haven't lasted past those three months. And I suppose if I don't make it, I have to be sure to be early to the next interview, which would be especially difficult for me.

Gimping Photoshop Tutorials

2007-02-13T18:34:00.000-04:00

Gimparoo is site where Photoshop Tutorials are converted for use in Gimp. Clearly a needed resource for converting Photoshop people to more frequent Gimp use.

Isn't that toxic?

2007-02-13T10:28:00.000-04:00

I applaud that the police are cracking down on piracy. They said that the CDs will be burnt in a public bonfire though. I thought that you're not supposed to burn CDs, like with an open flame, since that was toxic. I could be wrong of course.

9 to what?!

2007-02-11T17:32:00.000-04:00

I got a job now. It's a pretty cool one. It's a scary one too. It's a big company. Well, small by big company standards, but they still count as big in my eyes. Their technology is also enterprisey and fancy as hell. They're gonna evaluate me in three months to see if I've come up to speed on the technology, so I my tenure is not assured. The hours are crazy though. I basically have no life anymore. It's weird becuase everyone seems to be fine with leaving at 7 everyday. It's nuts. Aren't there other interesting things these people want to do?

Which sucks because I'll be missing Ubucon NYC and a NYC Diggnation Meetup, both of which I wish I could attend. These things don't roll around very often and at this rate, it doesn't look like i'll be seeing much of them anymore. I can't go to LUG or Python meetings anymore. I may not be posting on the blog much either. *sigh* oh well. I'm not completely vanished.

Access Agents are usually better when open sourced.

2007-02-11T17:29:00.000-04:00

Taran Rampersad let us know that Cisco is releasing their Network Access Agent as open source. I love this, only because the college, had started to use their crappy Windows-only desktop Cisco Trust Agent program. I assume that the open sourcing includes that app, which can only be a good thing

a trinibodycount perhaps?

2007-02-11T16:55:00.000-04:00

I found this post on BoingBoing and about a site called riobodycount where they rack up a meter of murders. What made me shudder is that the thought that we could have a version of that for Trinidad seemed logical to me at the time. A trinibodycount.co.tt so to speak. Weird that both Rio have legendary Carnival celebrations, and now horrific crime rates. Maybe there's a link.

This editorial by Selwyn Ryan seems to be the best commentary on the state of crime right now. He pretty much saying that there isn't really a criminal element that's a small vocal faction separate from the ideals of the rest of the country. This is the culmination of years of faulty thinking in our society. Corruption, racism and selfishness and all that.

What also made me shudder was this article about proposing that every citizen have a DNA profile. oi. Yeah that's gonna solve our problems somehow. It just goes to show how extreme the situation has become.

My head exploded so I had to blog

2007-01-25T23:01:00.000-04:00

I just installed Beryl in Ubuntu using the guide in the Beryl Wiki. I didn't install the proprietary drivers and just left the open source drivers to do their work. I followed the instructions one by one, enabling aiglx then installing and running beryl. Took only a few minutes. Then I typed beryl-manager and my head went kabloom. That was it. I kid you not for five minutes, I giggled while moving a window around. It was kinda sad actually. I haven't spent any great amount of time with it but I've noticed this much. Firstly, the amount of settings are kinda boggling. There's a lot to configure. Also it's not really intrusive at all. It's definitely fun at first, but it can be easily phased out of your mind after awhile. The Beryl Wiki installation guide made it really easy also. It also tried to make it as non-destructive as possible. It walks you through configuring a new GDM session so when you login you can choose either Beryl or regular metacity/kdm. It's there that you're reminded how much of a change Beryl is. You're basically replacing the piece of software that draws your windows on the screen in your graphical environment. I think that counts as major surgery. It works great, except for one thing. It doesn't draw the window borders on the screen when I have the window maximized. I just get a white band across the screen where the title bar should be. It's still a title bar, with buttons. It's just not drawing them right. Presumably installing the proper drivers would fix this, however this is an old ati chipset so I'm not entirely sure. So of course, it's so awesome, that I've vowed never to maxmize a window ever again until this problem gets fixed. The memory footprint is astonishing, emerald(the theming part), beryl and beryl-manager take up 1.5MB, 1.2MB and 524.00KB respectively. Having said that, it doesn't actually run blindingly fast on the machine. It runs respectively, such that I don't think that I'll see myself turning it off very often, but it's not snappy. Finally the only other problem is that it's not absolutely integrated with Gnome. That's a triviality though. I'm sure I've barely looked at it, it seems to have a ton of features but it's definitely an upgrade.

Senseless Ramblings on Ambivalence

2007-01-25T19:56:00.000-04:00

I was talking with a friend from school the other day. The exchange, whenever we chat, at some point always comes on the question of whether or not we'd be staying home or staying in America if we had the chance to make that choice. Both parties would dance around the topic afraid to answer. We both love home very much but like some things about here just as well. I know, for me, I would dance around the answer only because I don't want to seem like I'm somehow betraying myself, my allegiance, my roots or whatever it's supposed to be called. I can't speak for my friend.

I am Trini. I think. I appreciate this much more having spent some time outside of St. Anns, outside of Port-of-Spain, outside of that island right next to Venezuela. Right now, I pretty certain that I can't dare call myself anything less. But what exactly does that mean? To be Trinidadian. I always grew up in the capital, I never really had boy days. I never visited the beach much. I couldn't tell you the difference between Mayaro and Manzanilla Beach. I don't think I even liked Soca music until now. I can remember what computer game I was playing for most of my adolescent life. I can remember that as a family we've always visited the movies. The mall. I don't sound very Trinidadian.

I wonder what it would take to find out. I would like to know what may be missing. I'm sure there are many people in Trinidad who've lost the meaning of being Trinidadian. My friend said that it's getting really bad at home right now. My great-Aunt always says those things but it doesn't mean much coming from her. She hasn't been home in 30 years. My friend went home last December. It's always hard to hear such a thing. I was there only a year ago. It couldn't possibly be that bad could it? But when those statements are echoed my multiple people over e-mail, IM, and in the newspapers, you can't deny it.

It's easy to say, but I don't want to be someone who is cowering in fear. I don't want to say, 'oh it sucks, let's move, let's run away'. That doesn't seem right. Something about it sounds selfish. But I know it's obviously not that simple. You can't blame someone for doing what's best for their family.

Trinidadians need to understand two things. One is how special they are. There are only a million of us. Every person is that much more important because we compete on the same terms as giant countries. That means that every accomplishment made by a Trini is all the more special. The next is that people don't give a shit. Our story is never told because there are small islands just as special with just as few people and people in big countries have trouble finding themselves on the map, much less us. Trinidadians are the only ones who will fend for themselves. People need to think further that two feet in front of their face. There are more important things than money and if we stopped being greedy for awhile we could see that. Maybe then we'd stop stealing from each other.

When I hear relatives talk about moving to the U.S., I just sorta cringe inside because everytime it's said it's like saying home isn't good enough. Well it produced you, so does that mean that you're not good enough? It can only be as good as we make it. I don't think I would have that much more to add to my home. I can barely even get hired. There are much smarter people coming out of Trinidad everyday. The problem is that they don't look back. I think, I would like to keep looking back.

I don't know what's possessing me to write this. Maybe I just thought it would make a good blog post.

netstat -n ?

2007-01-22T21:22:00.000-04:00

Hmm, I guess I've not been in any mood to say anything for awhile and the blog has suffered as a result. Partly it's just a matter of being depressed over school being done. Oh well. I've had a fair amount of interviews, about 6 or so. I'm starting to lose track of the interviews that I've had.

This one was the 2nd one. It was a recommendation of one of my friends who thought I was a good fit for this place for some reason. Who knows why, but in any case it was financial services firm upstate. About an hour and a half's travel from Brooklyn. It was a freezing day, and I was very eager about making sure that I was early for these interviews. It was a time where I still wasn't tired of the whole thing. So I show up from the train, about an hour early and freezing my rass off. It was a little ways off from the train station, past the car park in what was otherwise a small town. I figure I don't want to be too early so I'll walk round for a bit. I walk around the block past a few shops, and then I went back. In retrospect that was a terrible idea cuz then I was even colder.

I get in about a half hour before and apparently I was two hours late. The HR woman scheduled the time too late for me. She told me 1pm and the people there thought it was 11am. One guy then began to talk to me. He took me over to the interview room which was a really nice room for that. It was a small closet with two couchy chairs in opposite corners that were at an angle to each other. I liked it because it feel easier. You can't feel glares directly on your face because the person wasn't facing you and you couldn't feel distracted by lost of stuff because it was a small empty room. The interview was going okayish meaning that they would ask the usual questions and I would have to do some language maneuvres to provide reasonable answers. Along the way he tripped me up twice with technical questions that I couldn't answer. The first was what was the down and up keys when using vi. I thought it had to be around the j or l area. It was clear that I didn't give a confident answer though. This guy was a Jamaican and must have picked up on me being a Trini and for some reason asked me to talk about Trinidad. I figured there had to be a trap somewhere but I went on about it, and after all that he asked me what does netstat -n do. Of course he just wanted to loosen me up so I couldn't fancify an empty answer. That didn't matter much because I had no clue what answer was the right answer and I had to tell him that. All in all not the most pleasant experience I've had.

Then the next guy came in and was asking similar questions, but no technical test-like questions. This guy was British and did more to explain the company. It was much easier with him of course. The part with him felt quicker as well.

Then it was over. He walked me out, and I knew I would never be working there ever. I felt like crap but not as bad as the first interview and I didn't feel quite as bad. My only question was exactly why DON'T i know what netstat -n does? Clearly I'm gonna blame my school for this because I've spent the past two years, and pretty much wasted my time for the whole thing. I think I'm just unemployable. It totally blows. I can't wait till the next interview.

Next time flip over to the back page

2007-01-22T21:09:00.000-04:00

I am up listening to Weezy and the Swish when I hear a story that triggers me to get up and record this memory. In the story they hear an e-mail from one of their fans, an 18 year old girl. I forget her handle. In her story she struggled and crammed for her ACT exam only to reach an hour late and be denied the chance to take the exam. That didn't happen me. When I screw up, it has to be as bitingly ironic as possible. Only then can I have the opportunity to go down in as much of a poetic flaming fireball as possible.

My best friend and I both took Computer Science for A-Levels. A-Levels is the exam taken at the end of secondary school in countries of the Commonwealth or at least in this country of the Commonwealth. It's basically first year university level coursework in secondary school. It's not easy by any means, and requires people to be in control of the academics from their first year. So it's no surprise that the train wreck that was our secondary school career put both me and my friend repeating our last year doing Computer Science all over again.

We had both changed our mindset this year around though. We studied and crammed and as painful as Computer Science can be, I had a substantially better grasp of Computer Science when the time rolled around. I don't remember too much about the how the exams went during that time. It was a weird time when you find yourself repeating exams. You feel so much more in control of the situation since you've seen all of it before. At the same time it is a bit like being in a foreign land where you don't have that much of a bond with those around you. When you sit at the desks doing the exam you haven't had the people around you as friends since Form 1. You know them but it's not the adventure that it is the first time around. I did know my friend doing the exam though.

We sat down and did the exam. I felt just fine about the whole thing. Both of us. Our Computer Science teacher finagled the exam paper, which he wasn't supposed to have. We looked at it, yeah, page 1 looked good. We talked over the questions. We opened the front page, looking at the middle page. It looks good. All the questions seem good enough. They turn to the back page... Wait back page? Wait a second, half the questions are back here! FUCK!

Here's the thing. My friend did the exact same thing.

He immediately stormed out of computer lab where we huddled around the test paper. I was really pissed too. I sat in front of the computer for awhile, trying to concentrate. It didn't work for long. I stormed out and went for a walk. I didn't stop walking. I walked from Port-of-Spain's center and I think I walked as far as Mucurapo before it calmed me down. It worked it the end though. My walk calmed me down.

As I listened to the podcast late at night, instead of going to sleep like I was supposed to, I thought back to that and remembered how much walking helped my stress. I also remembered how poetic it was that both my friend and I who were repeating screwed up in the exact same way.

Buying Hardware

2007-01-22T21:07:00.000-04:00

My Dad is building a new machine. The monitor on the old one is flickering in a strange fashion and just in general its days are numbered. So he got the case, CPU and motherboard home. He asked me to get the remaining parts online. Immediately I head to newegg for pretty much all the parts. I was gonna buy them here, mail them to my house ans then mail them home, since newegg doesn't ship internationally. So a few of the parts reach the house, and I figure I'll open them up to see what packaging I can discard so I can eventually cram everything into one box to mail and also to test what I can before sending it. I also figured for the hardware of issue I would buy things that I thought would be supported in Linux, so I could put Ubuntu on it once I got home. So I purchased a sound card that claimed to work in Linux, as well as an nVidia gfx card. Of the things that reached I couldn't test anything except the Wireless Mouse and The monitor. There was no place to install a floppy drive, hard drive or graphics card.

The monitor didn't actually work completely. I'm not sure if it was some deficiency in X.org or the graphics card in the two machines but it didn't seem to detect a widescreen resolution. In the laptop I plugged it in as the second monitor and it switched screens to the 19" widescreen as the monitor but it stayed at 1024x768. Same thing happened when I switched out the monitor in the old xubuntu box. It stretched the resolution over the whole screen. In the laptop I didn't restart the machine and the graphics card in the old box is really old. In the final box it'll be in a nvidia 7600GS so I expect that to support it once the time comes. If it doesn't work, I'll have to figure it out.

The wireless mouse worked in Linux though and it was supported in the GUI! I was kinda stunned. I didn't know there was anything to support, but there was a little tidbit in the Power Information Dialog in Gnome about something being charged.

Trinidad and Tobago Trademark Filing in iPhone suit

2007-01-11T14:03:00.000-04:00

According to The Trademark Blog via BoingBoing Cisco alleges that Apple made a front company based in Trinidad and Tobago in order to do the trademark filing for the word iPhone.

There's a U.S. application filed here in September, claiming March 2006 priority based on a Trinidad and Tobago application, in the name of Ocean Telecom Services. Cisco alleges that this is a front company for Apple.

Why does my little country get named in such things? Weird

I saw someone with a Zune

2007-01-08T20:22:00.000-04:00

Noones' going to believe me because I don't have any photographic evidence but on the train yesterday I saw someone with a Zune. It was a teen. It was the black one. He had some hip hop some playing. A widescreen album art showed up as the background which was really nice. The player certainly looks really nice.

Router Problems

2007-01-02T20:25:00.001-04:00

So I have an old machine that noone else in the house wanted to use so I took it. I also have my laptop. The old machine actually works perfectly and it was just a matter of getting rid of WinME and putting Linux on it. I have settled on using xubuntu on it for the time being and I use the old machine more and more. The two machines aren't networked though so I'm always dragging files using the usb drive all the time. It's very 1991.

So I finally tried to hook these two machines together. I bought a router, plugged everything in, turned everything on. And it didn't work. steups. And I was all excited too. The laptop running Ubuntu was using NetworkManager and it was no work at all. The desktop running xubuntu was the problem. It didn't seem to show up or work at all. The xubuntu machine couldn't log in to the router. I think the NIC doesn't work or is misconfigured so after scrounging up what little I had to get the router I still have no network. lshw tells me this for the NIC. I assume it's disabled since it doesn't work

*-network DISABLED
description: Ethernet interface
product: SMC2-1211TX
vendor: Accton Technology Corporation
physical id: 9
bus info: pci@01:09.0
logical name: eth0
version: 10
serial: 00:10:b5:8a:99:c7
size: 100MB/s
capacity: 100MB/s
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegociation
configuration: autonegociation=on broadcast=yes driver=8139too driverversion=0.9.27 duplex=full link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100MB/s
resources: ioport:2800-28ff iomemory:f4100400-f41004ff irq:9

Absent Minded Again

2007-01-02T20:23:00.000-04:00

Ah yes. It's been awhile since I dusted off the ole blog. I guess I don't have that much to say these days. Anywho.

I've had a few posts of my absent-minded shenanigans. This one in some ways tops them. It was coming down to the end of the semester and for international students there's some documentation that you're supposed to send in before the semester ends so that you have the work authorization for the year after you graduate which is a part of the student visa. So naturally of course I take a long time to see about it. In the end I wasn't exactly rushing to send it in but there could have been many weeks where it would have already been sent in.

In the end I did see about it though around Thanksgiving. I'm not sure exactly when but I know there was a Monday Holiday stuck in around that time. By that time I had all the papers organized and I went on that Monday to mail in everything. I also wasn't feeling well. I was just recovering from a fever and it was a rainy day outside so going on that day may not have been the best idea but I knew I had to see about it soon since the deadline for sending it was rapidly approaching.

So I went to the post office that afternoon, not only to send it but to purchase the money order for the fee that had to be sent it with it. $180. steups. So I wait in line, finally get service, go up to the cashier, ask for the money order and then I step aside to fill it out. Now the lady at the International Office gave me a checklist piece of paper with which to check that I got everything and on it and it said to make out the money order to 'Department of Homeland Security'. I did not have the paper at that time.

I didn't think much about it. I just checked the mailing address that I wrote on the envelope and put down the line that seemed most pertinent. That looked like 'U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services'. I didn't think about it for a long time after, just glad to get the rid of it, until I saw a money order sitting around the house about a week later. Then my mind wandered on it and it hit me. I flew upstairs and checked the paper and then just grumbled in panic/consternation.

How do I manage to let these things happen to me? I spoke with the person at the International Office who just said to wait it out and I'll get a letter from them if something was wrong. I couldn't refund the order either. I'd have to get it back, cash it and make another one. In any case, I did eventually get the receipt and it didn't seem to have any problems described on it, so I felt relaxed by that. It is just a receipt though, so that just says that they got it, not that they've begun processing it. I've been checking the website however and for the longest while it's been saying 'Received and Pending' which probably just means it's sitting in a stack in Vermont. I hope it doesn't take too long. All my other friends' stuff has been sent through so I don't know what to make of it, whether it was something wrong with what I sent, or how late I sent it or what. The only crappy part is I can't really be sure about doing Interviews until I get it.

Creative Writing Class: Piece of clothing

2006-12-11T16:30:00.000-04:00

This time I had to write on a piece of clothing that liked or could remember or held dear or something along those lines.

It's interesting to realize that a white shirt and khaki short pants would mean anything to anyone. Nonetheless thinking on that image opens a pathway of memories of days when things were very different. In my elementary school all children sported such an ensemble and while a simple combination it represented everything about my school and my childhood. I can remember those days on the playground pitching marbles or playing police & thief, jumping on the monkey bars or eating the bitter tambran (tamarind) fruit from off the tree in the yard. I can remember that one time where I tripped and busted my knees. It was a rainy day and the dust and gravel splayed all over my body. In a few seconds, I went from playful romping to looking like I came out of a battlezone. You'd see everyone on the playground and we were all equals. We were all blissfully unaware of the journeys that lay ahead of us. It harkens back to a simpler time that we as adults quickly forget.

Caribbean Free Radio up for Weblog Award

2006-12-11T14:29:00.000-04:00

Okay here's your mission. Click here and vote for Caribbean Free Radio. It's been nominated for a weblog award. Once you've done that bookmark the voting page and bring it up and vote again every time you switch computers or every 24 hours, which ever one comes first. It's as simple as that, now go forth and vote for our fearless leader.

Creative Writing Class: Object

2006-12-08T18:31:00.000-04:00

I had to write on an object. I wrote on my watch

I looked down at it on the table. It's such a nice watch. By all accounts, the most non-descript item you've ever seen, but still the most reliable. I wish the whole world worked that way. I wish I worked that way. I remember buying it on a rainy day at the shopping district near my house. I had gone for months without one since the last dependable reliable watch that worked for years had its battery pass away and there was nowhere I could go to fix it. On both accounts mylaziness and procrastination were the driving factors. Too lazy to replace a battery or to buy a $10 watch. When I first bought it, I thought it didn't work at all. It seemed dead. I rushed back to the store and politely complained to the Asian proprietors of the dollar store of what was going on. The man humbly pressed that one button that switches it back on from themode where you reset the time and it proceeded to tick away. He apologetically explained that it was to conserve the battery. I think now that it wasn't dead but obediently waiting for orders to begin work in service of its new master. Ironically, in spite of its unrelenting service, I still manage to be late for everything. Maybe I need a broken watch or no watch so I can blame it on that.

Creative Writing Class: A day you were proud of

2006-12-07T16:57:00.000-04:00

We had to write on a day we were most proud of

Not too many people take the Common Entrance Exam at age 10. I was always considered the young one; the one who stood at the front of the line in assembly; that bright little boy. Looking back, school was fun, but it was an unforgiving place. They found an excuse to stream every step of the way. Every grade had an A and a B class and your work determined your place every year. Your entire primary school career culminated in a massive streaming exam, the Common Entrance, that every child in the country partook of. It was a revered institution complete with its own mythologies, machinery hopes and fears built around it. Your result determined your educational future for the next 7 years, that is, whether you went to your first choice or were left by the wayside. On the day that everyone received their result, you could slice the sir with a knife. Everyone went for assembly in the yard and remained quiet. The principal walked up to each line of pupils and handing out their results given to them from the Ministry in a little blue-green envelope. In a moment you could hear screams of joy and the weeping and gnashing of teeth in that yard. I remember opening my envelope and peering into it and breathing out, exhaling that sigh: THe sigh of relief for passing for my first choice. I didn't scream and jump, but it was one of those feelings that was too big to feel at first. It was a joy that quieted me. I had to sit down to prevent from falling. I remember my parents came and picked me up a little bit later and took me out for pizza. It was a day that I am always proud of.

Creative Writing Class: Emotion

2006-12-05T16:27:00.000-04:00

This is the second thing that I wrote in class. We were to write on an emotion. I like and hate this one, because it's accurate, I like how I wrote it and it seems to strike deeply with everyone who hears it, but it's also kinda depressing.

It is the person that is the brother of fear and the cousin of depression. Its address book has the contacts of all manner of dark repressions of the human psyche. It affects the fragile soul because it is more vulnerable. The abused, the unhappy, the nervous, the sleep-deprived are all at risk. It creeps up slowly in your ribs and your fingertips draining the blood away from there and from your head. If you're not careful it will sneak up on you, blocking out the words and the reason from your mouth. Your lungs will forget their jobs and you will forget to breathe. The urgency has come you now and you must do something but it’s unclear what. At this point you've relinquished control becoming a different creature. One with only two objectives: run or scream. You look around and don't know what to do. Everything looks wrong, hot, sharp, cold, dangerous ad harmful. It steps back now having set its plan into motion, watching its efforts bloom, content to sign its name 'anxiety'.

So here's the deal...

2006-12-05T16:25:00.000-04:00

Am I the only one that thinks that the diggnation podcast is starting to get kinda lame? I honestly don't drink that much and it's kinda worrying to watch them drink as much as they do. The appeal of that part is starting to fade. Also when people are drunk they don't usually come up with profound or insightful things to say. Frequently they would be cracking up over silly things that aren't funny. Also they would be talking about things that aren't all that interesting and when they finally do some up with insightful things, it's wrong or I don't agree with them. A show can't be a hit forever but even twit (which I think is starting to lose some steam too) has a good episode every now and then (ep 78 was good). Meanwhile I think geekdrome does a much better job at what it does, they make jokes and whatnot, but they are typically very articulate about movies. If there's a movie that I'm not sure about seeing I just wait for the geekdrome thoughts before deciding on seeing it. It may be easier for them though because movies are inherently more mainstream and they don't have to worry about getting to technical the way diggnation does. Also diggnation has changed along with the site. As digg started having more sections, more random (but interesting or funny) crap would make it on the page as opposed to actual tech news so they'd be more likely to talk about that.

Creative Writing Class: Culture & Heritage

2006-12-04T14:35:00.000-04:00

I had a Creative Writing class this semester. I liked it. We didn't have a class we just sat around a wrote and told stories. At the end they had a colloquium and for our we class we just read a few of them for the class. I'm gonna post all of them, good or bad, for no particular reason. The first is my favourite. It was a take home assignment, which is different from most of the pieces which were done in class in between 10-25 minutes. We had to write a bit on our culture and heritage which I thought was difficult but we pretty much could write on any tangent that we wanted. This is one of the things that I read at the colloquium. It is about Trinidad of course and it was a hit. People found it funny, even parts that I didn't think were all that great. I think part of it is because that colloquium is always so terribly boring. Afterwards one of the teachers who was from China approached me and thought it was very interesting. I was struck by people's response to it cuz I still don't think it's all that.

Welcome to Trinidad and Tobago, land of steelpan and calypso and my home. It is a multi-faceted place capable of meaning so many different things to different people. I don't know of many other places where people live is the kind of ethnic harmony that we possess, where one can have an Indian, Black, White, Half-Chinese Half-Spanish. Half-Chinese Half-Indian and a Half-Chinese Half-American White friend and where none of that can really be an issue. Let me remind all visitors however if you can't stand heat-stroke, unpunctuality, or having your food drown in pepper sauce please turn back immediately.

If you want to come despite such a warning, a good place to go would be the 'coconut vendors'. You would find them throughout the island, at junctions between main roads and at beaches but one place you an always count on finding them would be around the Savannah. The Savannah isn't really a Savannah in the climatic sense but a large uncut lawn so to speak where people go to ride bikes, run, fly kites and play cricket or soccer and just relax. The coconut men would dot the circumference of the savannah, and many people would stop there for a nut. He would expertly pull one from the back of his truck with his cutlass and with no more than 3 deadly swings would remove its top giving you access to the heavenly coconut water inside. Once you're done you'd hand him the shell and a few more swings would crack it open for you giving access to the jelly. There are few conveniences in this life that can bring more contentment on a Sunday morning. Except maybe a doubles. An Indo-Trini food staple, it's quite a sight to see the long lines that show up daily for the doubles vendors around the country. And who can blame them? It's a good meal substitute and tastes really good. In any case I can remember my family going for an early morning Sunday run and sometimes going with them if I woke up early enough. I think they reached a point in life as I got older where they started looking out for their health a little bit and picked up the habit from there. We would run up the Chancellor's Hill next to the Savannah and then go for a coconut then either a doubles or some bake and saltfish. Then we went for groceries and once we got home we would help her with Sunday Lunch.

I think in many ways we had a very atypical family. They would never really participate in too much, preferring to work hard at their jobs and relax in the house. I found myself outside looking in to many of the country's traditions. I remember going to see the Parade of the Bands when I was younger. This also took place at the Savannah. It is culmination of the Carnival season, which usually began as early as November of last year leading up to February. Carnival is the season of celebration, dance, revelry and music that we hold so very dear to our hearts. It starts out as a series of disconnected events; a higher than usual frequency of major parties, called fetes featuring Soca artists and their new releases but is highlighted by events such as Dimanche Gras, Panorama, J'Ouvert and the Parade of the Bands. The Parade of the Bands would be when the revelers put on their costumes and 'free up' themselves on the nation's roads. Think of it a massive therapy session involving erotic wining and Soca music in place of conversation and expensive psychologists. The country collectively releases all of its pent up conflicts on the road. You can imagine that a giant party that hijacks the nation's capital in late February usually results in a higher than usual birth rate in late October & early November.

When I was younger we would frequently visit my Granny and grandpa in South, in San Fernando to be precise. My cousins from that side of the family are all from South and we would all usually stay over at her house for the better part of the August vacation. My grandfather on that side was an accountant on the 'oil fields' I never knew exactly which 'oil fields' or what accounting had to do with oil and for a long time before that I didn't know he did accounting. Many people moved to San Fernando in the early part of the century to work on the oil fields there during the establishment of the region as the center of the oil industry here in Trinidad. This area with its rolling hills, felt much homier than in Port-of-Spain where I lived. I can remember the afternoons spent on the plum tree in search of plums and the endless hours of hide and seek. Great Fun.

Usually when the parents went to see a 12-years-and-over movie when I was young, they would leave me with my other grandparents in Belmont, these being the ones of Chinese descent on my father's side. My grandpa ran a rum shop in St. James in Port-of-Spain for as long as I can remember. The rum shop was one of those pillars of the community at Bellevue Terrace, a place that could always be relied on. My father would talk on the fact that he was always available. People would knock on the door at 2 in the morning looking for cigarettes and he would answer. They had moved to Belmont in Port-of-Spain as they got older. The house on Codrington Street like so much of Belmont, a cramped mosaic of small houses woven together by a fabric of roads and walkways and signed with the path of the East Dry River, which wasn't even a river but a big canal. Historically it is one of those places that the poorest stayed when they came to Port-of-Spain looking for work. It was like walking into a different world sitting next to the bustling capital’s metropolis. When I stayed there grandma would make banana fritters with tea. I loved how she added so much condensed milk. She would wash clothes by hand using the juking surface in the big concrete sink in the backyard. As child I would bathe there whenever I stayed there in the afternoon. She'd still wash in the sink even after Uncle Ronald got her a washing machine. I can remember that grandpa would burn incense and keep a few artifacts, like a few statues of Buddha, in the cabinet. He would show it to me and even taught me a few words of Chinese. It hurts that I don't remember it. I read much later of the Chinese tradition to have an area in devotion to their ancestors. This is the closest thing that I equate it to.

There are many more customs and rituals to this little island that are essential to its definition. There is the native culture leading up the colonial establishment and the introduction and growth of different immigrant cultures. There is Phagwa, Divali, Hosay, and Eid. There is Limbo, steelpan, Parang, Chutney, Calypso. There are Hindus, Shouter Baptists, Catholics and Anglicans. These are all ours; belong to us, invented by us.

On the train

2006-12-03T19:30:00.001-04:00

I remember sitting on the train when I went ot see Casino Royale. A woman and her mother got on the train and were talking about a sweater. The woman was a strange character, the kind with a crazy accent, like she was a fashion designer or somebody from Sex in/and the City. She and the mother were talking about buying a sweater and finding a restaurant. It was one of those situations where people are exposing a completely different way of life that just seems foreign. She seemed to be some kind of modeling agent because she looked at a pretty lady sitting across the car and very boldfacely just asked her if she was a model and if she had a portfolio. I was maceauing hard for the whole thing. I wonder how people manage to have to no problem talking all their business on the train without a care in the world.

I was walking through the 14th St station and saw a skater curled up in a ball in a corner of the station, sleeping soundly on the ground, his skateboard lying next to him. I wanted to walk up to the androgrenous looking person and nudge them into life but they looked peaceful as it was. People here seem to have no problem sitting anywhere in a public place, the pavement, the ground in the park. It was very odd at first but I have no problem doing that these days. Despite that the person still seemed odd in that circumstance.

Casino Royale

2006-12-03T19:29:00.000-04:00

I realise that I may be a little naive with movie going etiquette for hit shows. I got hit with the sold out shows for Borat and thought that was a blip reserved for any mega-release ala Spiderman or Lord of the Rings. I tried going to see Casino Royale and was proven wrong. I learnt that I should never see a new release for a 7/8 show on a Saturday on the opening weekend if it's gonna be a big show. The exact same thing happened. I visited 5 theatres and all the reasonable times were sold out. Throughout the night I found myself zooming back and forth in between East and West side. I found myself walking through Koreatown and Times Square. I even found a Scifi Convention hosted in a building on 34th Street. I wanted to go to that instead but it was already late and I didn't think I could afford to go to that instead of the movie. If the big sign was any indicator it looked good. They had the guy who plays Chief from Battlestar Galactica. That really would have been worth it much more than the movie. Again, like last time I just bought a ticket for the movie on the following day.

Once I got to see it, it really was frickin awesome. I heard a review that dissected the movie as another Bond movie template and it was just that, but the devil's in the details. What made it good was the way it was executed. It gave a proper attempt at treating itself seriously and being smooth. The nice thing about the treatment of the old Sean Connery Bond films was that it felt very calm, restrained and just coool. Most Bonds since then have gotten more flashy and more Hollywood. These films should tap into the idea of a smooth character. It plays on guys' fantasies of being a smooth dude, the kind that's western European, with a sophisticated accent, and a good taste in expensive alcoholic beverages. The kind who knows stupid games like poker and drives fast European cars. Just that cool that's cultured. The last few Pierce Brosnan Bond films were almost parodies of themselves, not that it was Brosnan's fault, he was fine. They just didn't feel the smooth. Casino Royale feels smooth. The only problem was the ending which was the really weird kind where they have 45 minutes of extra movie past where it should have ended.

Lanyap

2006-12-03T19:27:00.004-04:00

I'm going to be finishing school very soon and it's about that time where one starts looking for work. I went to about two job fairs so far, and got an interview from one of them. It's upstate in White Plains. I didn't expect too much from it but it was definitely a bit of an endeavour. I've never traveled very far upstate, never saw a need to. So there was a bit of an hassle to go up there. On the other hand, the Harlem Metro-North train line has some really nice trains, and once I got there White Plains itself was really nice. Very posh-looking clean streets amidst all the countryside. After that there was another 5 minute drive to get to the business. It was a newspaper and the interview went very well. They then took me on a little tour of the newspaper which was very interesting. I did allude to the fact that I was into programming and after the interview I spoke to the HR dude that I originally met at the job fair. He sorta alluded to the fact that I needed Mac experience. It was a tech support-y position so that equaled Mac experience since it was a newspaper after all. So I don't think that I was necessarily bad but I'm sure they'll find someone better. The HR guy then sent me to talk to the head developer and he just tore me to shreds. I guess I talked too much about programming so he thought I actually knew something and didn't realise I was talking out of my ass. That guy just had a checklist of things he wanted to know Database Experience, Language Experience, Web Experience all that stuff. I wanted to cry at the end of that conversation. He was this brusque, hard-faced and short Asian dude that sounded like he had far too much work on his hands to be speaking to me. That's when I knew that I need to actually learn something real or the next year is going to be just like this. What the hell have I been doing for the past two years? Man, my college sucks. The guy asked me to show him what I had which was next to nothing. Once I went home, I couldn't even find that next to nothing so I never got back to him.

I remember on the train feeling bad about the whole experience. I did want to explore White Plains but it was getting dark. I remember putting on the headphones and listening to the new Lanyap album, God is Love. I finally did get it, CDBaby was very prompt about it and now that I have it it's hard to not feel bad once you do because the music makes you feel good. Perhaps part of it is that I wish I had more local music, but it really is some groovy tracks. It is cut from the same cloth as Orange Sky but it has it's own identity. It's much more overtly spiritual and feels a little bit preachy/chant-ish (I'm not making much sense right now) but none of it is offensive but obvious and relevant. I love that local musicians are commenting on politics and crime because there needs to be an output for these societal things since they're so prevalent. This album is no exception. It really is something that embraces being Trinidadian and the music shows it. I'd really recommend it to anyone.

edit: Lanyap's album is also available on Amazon MP3 and Amie Street

I wonder if there's gonna be an Infosys Trinidad

2006-11-28T18:55:00.000-04:00

I've given up on reading all my feeds on a daily basis so I just bookmark everything that I wanted to read and get around to it eventually. Among these things is a fairly old Guardian article on the trade pact between Trinidad and India. It seems to relate to foreign investment in both countries by the other. The interesting mention in passing was about setting up "fully owned plants in areas like health, information technology, film-making, food and beverage, printing and packaging and other sectors."

I wonder what that would entail for film making and information technology (them being the only interesting industries in that sentence) It sounds like a good idea. I hope it amounts to something.

ShortDrop

2006-11-16T17:11:00.000-04:00

It's a rare thing to find a Trinidadian local website whose online service is all that great. Usually if the service is comprehensive the site looks like crap. Most of the reason that one would go to such a site is because they offer a niche product specific to T&T. That's why ShortDrop looks interesting. It's a website offering cars, parts, accessories and classifieds. And it doesn't look like crap. I obviously can't attest to its quality of service but it seems okay. I'm conservative about doing such things online but it's a good attempt.

Ogg Vorbis Podcasts

2006-11-13T10:45:00.000-04:00

I wish more people used Ogg Vorbis Audio. I just have to vent on this because it confuses me when a podcast puts out an ogg version and doesn't put out an ogg vorbis feed. You might as well not bother if you do. What point is there to that? It's basically saying that ogg is not important and we just put it out to shut me up and you'd better be happy that we're doing anything at all for you. It discourages anyone who would've otherwise considered bothering. So far the Linux Questions.org podcast is a suspect, which is funny because it's a really good podcast. The feed has both the mp3 and ogg links but the mp3 links the one in the enclosure. FLOSS Weekly is another really bizarre suspect too. They put out an ogg version but there's no ogg feed, and they don't put the ogg link in any feed once it comes out. The actual ogg link doesn't show up in the feed or on the site until much later. So to get the ogg version of that podcast you have to rename the mp3 link, which is just ridiculous. FLOSS Weekly isn't really very weekly either and they only seem to interview first-gen Open Source superstars. I'm sure one day they'll run out of inventors of open source programming languages to interview. I could understand that Chris DiBona is busy though. Geek Entertainment Television is another suspect, in the same vein. It's a nice geeky podcast and I was stunned that they have an ogg theora version but the ogg theora version only happens for really old episodes. How long could it possibly take to transcode a 5 minute video?

Conflicts of Interest

2006-11-10T16:49:00.000-04:00

You know its not a major government run construction undertaking in Trinidad unless there's some unprofessionalism involved. Even the trains aren't exempt. hmm.

Lanyap

2006-11-10T15:26:00.004-04:00

Someone told me about a band in Trinidad named Lanyap. I don't have the album yet but they sound really awesome. Check out their big hit right now, I Need You. Give Praise and God is Love are nice tracks as well. It's a sweet blend of Rock and Reggae which comes best from T&T. If you can check their site they have the releases off the new album "God is Love" available for download. You won't be disappointed. It's distinctly a sound in the general roots-rock Orange Sky camp, although I would say that it's more of a midway in between the much more funk-oriented Of Birds and Bees Orange Sky and the metal-oriented Upstairs Orange Sky. Of course I love to hear any rock coming out from Trinidad especially when they tap into to what's unique about where they're from instead of trying to sound like Evanescence (Unless they do that really well). If you feel the inclination to pick up the album they have it available on CD Baby for purchase (edit: as well as on Amazon MP3 and Amie Street).

Borat: Cultural Learnings of Limited Movie Release for make benefit uproarious guttural sto-mache laughter

2006-11-08T13:49:00.000-04:00

Listen. Stop what you're doing right now, stop reading this blog post, and go and see Borat.

The funny thing is everyone decided to do just that on opening day last Friday of the Borat movie, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, including myself. The only problem was that there was a limited release of the film because the studios were afraid that middle America, which the movie makes fun of, won't get the joke, so it only opened on 800 theatres in America. So I get up to go around 6:00. The Regal's by Union Square not showing it. I got a paper which had where it was showing. I usually never go to anywhere but that Regal's unless its one of those independent things that's showing in one of those IFC independent style theatres. In any case I don't know exactly where any of the theatres are so I go to one on 23rd street but its on the West Side so I find myself walking along 23rd street and there it's sold out for all the showings except for one late showing. So I go to Lincoln Square, skipping that cinema on Times Square because $12.00 to see a movie is robbery. $10 is robbery that I can tolerate but that extra $2 is just cruel and unusual. The Lincoln Square cinema is the same situation. One showing that's not sold out is after 10 or 11, and this 7pm right now that I'm there. So I'm starting to get frustrated. It's the third cinema and each cinema requires going on the subway during rush hour and it's cold outside. So I figuring the trend by now, but I try another cinema, the one on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and I'm in uptown Manhattan. That wastes an hour and once I get there its the same. All the shows were sold out except the 11:55 showing. So I'm ready to go home but I try one more the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) theatre also downtown. In that one every single show for the day was sold out. Thoroughly deflated, I go up and buy a ticket for the earliest showing for the following day, Saturday.

So I FINALLY get to see it on Saturday afternoon, and it's absolutely hilarious. The kind of funny that'll induce uproarious guttural laughter where if you're not careful you could faint(well maybe not that extreme but guttural nonetheless). It's a short movie, there are scenes on Youtube and even in the trailer that aren't in it but that may be for the better since it's basically the same joke right through. He's offensive, anti-semitic, racist, sexist and it's funny. I think it's because its a character that tries to be as foreign from reality as possible. It's like a puppy or a baby. Look at the way females behave around a cute baby or a cute pet like a puppy and there's goo-goos and gahs-gahs. Basically the silliest, dumbest behaviour imaginable but because you can't communicate with a baby you shed conventions and restraint and behave differently. It's the same way with Borat, by acting like he can't understand the culture, the America that Borat makes fun of, opens up and say things that boggle the mind sometimes.

That's part of what the satire is, just showing that 200 years on, people are still bigoted, except now they just hold their tongue in the name of being civil. The other part is just how silly this caricature of man is. Just portraying this anti-semitic dude in that manner. In any case the whole movie is funny. I'm going contradict myself and advise that you not let the hype of it get to you because the groundswell of hype is massive and nothing lives up to that. It is worth watching though. Where I sat in BAM was on the end next to two old people. I think I was offensive with my crazy cackling. Even at 2 in the afternoon the cinema wasn't sold out but it was packed. At least two people sat on the ground in the aisle watching it because they get fedup of looking for a seat.

The Press Release Heard Around the World

2006-11-07T15:53:00.000-04:00

Of course people have heard it by now Novell and Microsoft now have some sort of agreement to work together to make it easier for SuSE Linux Enterprise and Windows Server to interoperate. Yep, it does sound crazy, it wasn't just me. It's interesting to hear the different viewpoints that have bounced around. On the GATT Forums it made a small but growing and vocal minority (including myself :) wish that it could somehow help Linux gaming. Never happening. I read on NYLUG that it's basically a ploy and it'll bring down SuSE Linux because SuSE will be littered with closed source binary blobs and it'll defeat the whole purpose of open source. The Linux Action Show really broke it and down and attempted to justify the business wisdom for Novell behind this although really the business wisdom was quite obvious. Any kinda relationship with MS really gives the impression that SLE is the 'Microsoft Approved' Distro. If you're a business with Linux on the brain go with Novell. Action Show also touched on two other important things I didn't realise. Between this and Oracle's announcement of basically supporting Red Hat cheaper, it really validates Red Hat. They've basically got all their competitors scrambling to compete with them. Also part of the agreement outlines patent forgiveness for non-commercial Linux folk but what about commercial Linux folk like Red Hat? For me I just thought it was a weird coincidence since I happened to have the Wired October Issue that I got from Nextfest and the very night before I found out about this, I read this article in it about how Ray Ozzie was replacing Bill Gates as chief architect. The article basically discussed how Microsoft was becoming less of the evil, proprietary, money-grabbing, small company-squashing, crappy-code monkey making, monolith that it once was. Now I like to give the benefit of the doubt but Microsoft has genuinely earned that reputation over the years, so it's quite understandable when any announcement that Microsoft is trying to be the good guys falls on deaf ears. There seem to be more and more such stories coming out regularly and they seem to be followed by conflicting stories in the opposite view. There hasn't been any concrete action on Microsoft's part that really unequivocally shows a more friendly stance. Even if they are trying to be a more friendly force, I wonder if its even possible in any reasonable amount of time with Microsoft being the massive company that it is. To me this is another such story, although I'm kinda expecting an actual concrete story to come out one of these days if this keeps up. The day I hear them actually open source something of value, or even open source old code or support open standards like ogg or opendocument in their desktop OS for home users then I'll be really surprised. I'd love to hear what the Novell Open Audio Podcast has to say about this.

Codec Support

2006-11-07T15:49:00.000-04:00

It's definitely obvious that one of the stumbling blocks for desktop Linux is codec support out of the box. When one reads of something like Eric Raymond looking to support the codecs out of the box by working a solution out with Linspire it makes you wonder is it worth it? The whole point of open source software, as I understand it, is to live in a world where your information isn't encumbered in any fashion. So a Word Document could work on any Word Processor and any one of those Word Processors could work on any operating system and any one of those operating systems could work on any hardware and be tailored for any hardware specs and so on and so forth. Granted for some apps that can't be open sourced they have to ported the old fashioned way by hiring some guy to do it. But really you should be able to have data in a form that can be read anywhere. that's the whole point of ogg. So you could have music that could be libre. Granted it may not feel like it, in reality, since instead of Windows and MacOSX supporting it they support their siloed format(aac,wma) and a patented one(mp3) and then music players all support those formats and only some support ogg (although those that do are quite good), while libre OSes can't support the patented or copyrighted ones. I still like ogg though since 50 years from now free software will still be able to play that music and 50 years from now the software I used to play an mp3 will still have to be paying the Fraunhofer institute or whoever. Furthermore its a trivial task getting ogg to work on any computer and it actually sounds better.

The interesting thing though is the belief that people should have this choice between libre and non-libre and then once Linux has the market share the clout and usage of the libre format will somehow magically increase. First I think that the choice part is definitely true. All that mess in the previous paragraph that somehow libre==freedom doesn't equal reality if everyone isn't part of the libre ecosystem. If they all use patented stuff it feels more like libre is left out and isn't free. Furthermore getting the libre ecosystem to grow requires a practically advantage to be sold to someone who would move over. With music or documents where the file size is small and in music's case where ogg actually sounds better there is some case to be made. Meanwhile for poor ogg theora it seems impossible to make a case for that since it doesn't actually look that much better than h.264 or divx and its file size isn't much smaller and encoding is no trivial task. So making choice easy is important.

I'm still not sure that somehow the free format would benefit though. Wouldn't people just keep using the non-free if it was easily available? I think that for the most part yes, and for those people let them stay there. I realise there would be some impact though. Think about wma. The only reason it's even considered as a format is because its the default ripping option in Windows Media Player, you know WiMP? The media player that comes out of the box for Windows the OS running on 95% of all machines. Many people just end up ripping it to wma just cuz its there and because of the sheer scale of Windows users, wma is a format to be reckoned with. Ogg could have that if there was a 10% market share for linux users. People would just use ogg because it's there. The key is default placement. It has to be the first thing there and anything else has to take a few extra clicks to enable. It should be intuitive though.

huh? wha yuh say?!

2006-10-29T18:22:00.001-04:00

I believe that I have a serious problem. It's called zoningoutwiththeearphoneson syndrome. What made me realise this was what happened the other day. I came off the subway, Incert Coin blaring in my ears. I thought to get a chicken noodle soup by the Chinese Restaurant. So I walk in and ask for it, have a seat and a bit later it's done. All the while my ears are plugged up and as he hands it to me, I just take it and walk straight out the store, completely forgetting to pay anybody for anything. I walk all the way home, go upstairs, take out the food, and get 80% through the soup before it hits me that I haven't paid for it. So I had to fly all the way downstairs and in the cold, 4 blocks to get back to the corner, and pay the man. I had to back, I'd like to return for soup another day after all. As quietly as I walked out I walked back in, and just handed him his money, said I forgot and flew back out. How silly I must have looked.

Ubuntu 6.10

2006-10-29T18:16:00.000-04:00

Well the next version of Ubuntu, Edgy Eft is out. It's meant two things for me. Most important of these is that I've blown Windows off my laptop, separating me further from anything Windows or non-libre than ever before. I feel a little naked now, unsure of whether I'll come upon that point where I'll need Windoze for something and be totally screwed. It'll be good though. In reality I wonder how I functioned with it on the laptop in the first place. The laptop is a piece of crap, with only 30 gigs of hard drive space. And with 4 gig for Win and 4 gigs for system files, that doesn't leave much space for my stuff. So that was my justification for finally getting rid of the Windows partition. The next thing is that I did it on a clean install of a wiped partition for both ubuntu and xubuntu on the laptop and desktop. Both were the result of silly things I shouldn't have been doing or from strange things having happened. For ubuntu it's because I was messing with gParted the week before the ubuntu release. Because the laptop felt so crowded hard-drive wise, I thought I would try it out to shrink the Win partition since I hadn't had too much stuff on it anymore and then let the other stuff fill in the space. I heard that as of version 0.30 it supported full move on all filesystems which it didn't do at 0.25. So I tried it and it worked, perfectly. But I don't know exactly what it did because later on when I was using it, at seemingly random moments, a process would consume massive amounts of resources and the hard drive would just go crazy. I think it was the filesystem that was just moving files around to adjust to having been suddenly resized and moved in that manner. I still didn't like it and found it as a halfway decent excuse to wipe it clean. The xubuntu box had to be reinstalled because the upgrade in Synpatic from the CD crapped out. I left it overnight to find a desktop with no panels in the morning that was frozen and wouldn't boot when I tried. That had me pissed, but /home was a separate partition so I could keep all the data, but still I hadn't backed up and stuff could still go wrong. Nothing did and I kept all the data, but for some reason the install gives trouble on this box so I had to try multiple times before it completed. I then replaced the user profile to sorta start over with the profile settings.

Blazin' fast, and pretty pretty colours, the kind that make your eyes glaze over

Ubuntu looks substantially better than it did before. They seem to eclipse the awesomeness of the images in each upgrade every time. Everything looks shinier particularly the boot splash, which looks like it's glowing at you. I can't reliably tell if the Upstart boot process makes for a faster load time. It actually does seem to, but it's not quite as fast as when Windows flips on, and that could partly be an illusion since the boot details don't show anymore. The major app upgrades, Firefox and Gaim, now look substantially better, especially Gaim. I haven't tried them on the net yet though. The week that I moved the laptop to somewhere with connectivity to get the cd images not only did wireless not work but ethernet doesn't seem to be working well either. It appears to be chugging very slowly. I'm convinced that the laptop is aiming to die within the next few months. I see my future and its me looking for a used Thinkpad on eBay. Nonetheless Firefox and Gaim look much nicer. Evolution seems to be faster as well. I'm always complaining that OpenOffice's support for embedded sounds in Powerpoint presentations is a bit so-so. I can't say that it isn't anymore but it seems to work again for the time being. They included F-Spot which was a major upgrade. My only complaint with F-Spot is with it's timeline-like slider for overall navigation which works for organizaing images by date but not by folder. I like to organize by folder so I'm never sure what folder I'm looking at in it. They should replace the timeline with a line of folders when you switch it. It also takes a bit of adjustment to use only tags as the only form of picture organization, but it turns out to be just as good as all the kitchen sink methods that digikam throws at you(tags, saved searches, albums, date). All in all it's interface is really slick. I can't say I have much use for Tomboy, the notes app. The old sticky notes app still works just fine. I don't why anyone needs more that a text box to put text in for a notes app. It's also much faster which reminds me, everything seems to be faster. In addition to being obsessive about the small hard drive I'm growing more vigilant about the 256 MB of memory and am always bringing up the system monitor to check things out. Edgy definitely shaves off a lot of the memory usage.

A cute little audio player icon

The biggest surprise was Rhythmbox. When I plug in the iAudio it actually recognizes it as a digital audio player now (with a little audio player icon) and not just a hard drive. It brings up Rhythmbox and loads the iAudio as an object in it with all the songs in it and it brings up all the playlists in it as well. That took me by surprise. To do that in Windows I think you have to install the firmware with Playsforsure support so it'll come up in media player 10 at which point everything must happen in wimp10. It also supports Album art now as well. It still doesn't do all that album art search that Amarok does. I still installed Amarok for that and all its other features but I think I'll be content to use Rhythmbox more now. I'm starting to come around more and more to all the kde apps and their multitude of features. One of the first things i did was to install k3b, ktorrent, konversation, konqueror(for when firefox starts slowing down), amarok, kopete and digikam off the kubuntu cd. There aren't any really good burning or torrent programs in gtk or gnome now, even though I haven't tried gnomebaker in a while so maybe its gotten better. And i heard of an app called rufus for torrenting but i couldn't download it. The thing that got me about gnomebaker was that when you dragged something across to the project window and it was a folder, you couldn't open the folder from there and remove files from that folder for the data project. Seemed like such an obvious part of the program that was missing. Since then it's been k3b for everything. I'll try to avoid using those programs but I like having the features around when I think I need them. That's the only reason i installed the others besides k3b and ktorrent. I don't think I'll ever actively use them. With any luck I'll ween myself off all the kde programs over time.

Don't get me wrong

Not that I have anything against kde. It's just that kde programs should be used in kde since they have such tight integration. You pull down one of those apps and they often pull down a bunch of weird dependencies by virtue of all their features. If I can avoid those extra little things in memory while using the machine that would be good. I still want to try the apps though and see what the new features are. I would be using kde except i've come to like gnome's simplistic interface and gnome is now so fast. plus ubuntu as a project has such traction, the development is moving quickly so it's still very viable. I still wish I had a box to play with suse or kubuntu or mandriva on it. I think kde, really is a better desktop as far as the options that the apps have. The interface just feels a little bit overwhelming to a new user. i can't explain why. Perhaps it's just a personal preference. I wouldn't be surprised if I switch over to kde once kde 4 comes out or even before that.

Xubuntu

Xubuntu was no schelp either. It really feels modern even with its aim to slightly lower-end machines. Again I've been able to setup everything like the ubuntu box. It's still missing a Rhythmbox-ish music manager but they switched the media player to gxine. They included OpenOffice Writer though which I don't get. I guess people want a full word processor. Abiword still seems fine to me. In general there's a lot of little extras that improve like an 'Extract to Here' right click menu entry in Archives which was missing before. It even has a comparable notes applet now. It's clear that xubuntu's purpose is to clone ubuntu's experience but with half the memory footprint. It's well on its way to doing that. Xfburn which looks like gnomebaker now supports that other complaint I had with gnomebaker that I mentioned. That makes me think that Gnomebaker might support it as well. It also does that thing with my iAudio which is nice. The theme is more of traditional Tango blue as well instead of the Tangerine Orange that Ubuntu embraces. It feels even more minimalistic. The only bug is that Xfburn can't seem to burn an image anymore. xfburn, which works like k3b in that it's just a cdrecord frontend, spits out a cryptic error when I try to burn an image. Can't explain it but I shall file my bug and continue to tweak.

Surprise surprise, t'was all in all a very pleasing experience. Suspend still doesn't work but I give up on that. Really and truly the only thing missing in desktop linux is the games and the out-of-the-box codec support. Solutions for codecs are coming down the pipe but the games really is an issue. Linux desktop users need to show a tangible way of pronouncing that they're in support of linux games. Does this mean that linux supporters should buy any linux game that comes out regardless of whether we like it or whether we have the hardware to play it? One thing at a time. I only just got rid of Windows.

Tripped and Falling's album Bleed Victoria is out for free

2006-10-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

In celebration of the launch of their new website and their new UK tour our favourite local rock gods, Tripped and Falling have put out their album for free for download. I don't know how long this would be but if you're on the fence or you're broke or even if you're not a fan (an impossibility but still) pick it up and pass it onto a friend. I'd recommend buying it anyways so you could get it at higher quality.

Carib Beer in Rocketboom

2006-10-25T13:11:00.000-04:00

Did anyone notice on the October 23rd edition of Rocketboom that they featured a minute shot of the Carib booth with some really hot girls (Carib Girls i assume) manning the booth? They visited the Beertopia convention at the Javits Center and in the mini-montage in the episode a quick blip flashed by of the home brew. How ironic that it's the 10/23 edition of Rocketboom about beer takes place on my birthday when I turn 21 and can now drink legally. hmm.

Converting music to OGG and Windows Live Mail

2006-10-23T13:44:00.000-04:00

A while ago I tried the Windows Live Mail which was nice but didn't work and therefore was dead to me. It works in Firefox now, Check it out it's awesome. Hopefully it'll work in Iceweasel too. *sigh* I guess we have Gmail to thank for all these nice web based mail services now.

Also if you're out there thinking about Linux or free software in general, but all your music is in mp3 there's a neat utility that I found that remedies that. Typically one way to future-proof your music to be free software friendly is to convert it to ogg except I've never known an easy way to do it. Then I found a CLI utility in Synaptic by accident called mp32ogg. It makes it simple to convert your music library to ogg. To install it in ubuntu or debian(apt-get is awesome!!!) you do this in your terminal...

sudo apt-get install mp32ogg

To convert your music to ogg you type this in the terminal.

mp32ogg --delete musicfolder

So for me it's 'mp32ogg --delete Audio' and then I just left my machine on all weekend to let it do its deed. It'll recursively go through the folder converting all the mp3s to oggs. It didn't seem to affect performance and I didn't have to think about it much. I was still able to do other stuff on the machine. The --delete part is to delete your old mp3 once it's made the ogg version. You can leave it out and it would make copies instead. The only caveat with it is that it doesn't report how many mp3s are left while it's going through a folder and if it finds an error in an mp3 (Once it found a corrupt mp3 and one with a bitrate that it didn't comprehend for some reason) it'll just error out and wouldn't move on to the next file. So you'll have to periodically check it every now and again. Other than that it worked great for me.

Old Wisdom

2006-10-18T10:53:00.000-04:00

Here's some wonderful gems of Auntie Kim wisdom:

First we have the remedies

Induce Labour: Drink Hot Spice Cinammon Tea
Prevent Childbirth: Drink Coconut Root (Could Kill You)
Cold: Drink Shadow Beni. Boil and Drink the Shadow Beni Water
Stoppage of Water (Prostate): Drink Stinging Nettle Water (with Some Tomato Juice)
To Cool You Down in the Sun (Heat Stroke?): Drink Maryshutyuhdoor. Maryshutyuhdoor is the grass in the savannah whose leaves close up when you walk on it. (Could Kill You)
Fever: Rub Lime with Nutmeg with Alcohol & Water
Fever: Boil Fever Grass Tea, Looks like Palm Sunday Leaves
Inflammation (Bruised Blood, Clotted Blood): Rub Aloes on the skin And/Or Drink Aloes with Egg whites for about 9 days
Inflammation (Cuts & Bruises): Balikaeda Leaves reduce inflammation
Purge: Senna
Excema: Crush Balikaeda Leaves(Small Purpulish leafed Shrub that bears a knot on the edge), heat, apply with Vaseline. Clean and Wash the area.
To Fall Asleep: Angostura Bitters with Nutmeg
Gas: Angostura Bitters

And here's some sayings

You go wonder how water get in pumpkin belly with no hole: When you're suspecting that you're a Carnival baby...

If crab don't walk he won't get fat: If you don't get up off ur ass and work, you won't have money to eat.

What in monkey belly belong to him: Don't procrastinate. Putting something down for later is a guaranteed means of forgetting it.

The bell will ring and the market will close: Make haste. hurry up.

Never damn the bridge you cross: Always try to maintain good relations because you might need help from that person you offended.

Fly with eagles but always keep company with fowl: Aspire to reach heights but don't forget where you came from. Always acknowledge the little guy. If you were poor and became rich don't behave too big for the poor person.

DigitalLife '06

2006-10-16T10:45:00.000-04:00

I've attended yet another expo today. Two expos in two weeks. This time it's the DigitalLife consumer expo which is typically one of those crazy consumer things where a bazillion people walking in and out. I wanted to be early and reach when it opened but I didn't get there until 3:00. I got a free ticket from the dl.tv offer so getting in this time wasn't quite the pain that it was last time. They took up twice the real estate in the Javits Center that they took up last time so in general it was much roomier and spacious. Now it wasn't that much more spacious so it was still a sensory overload right through.

2 gigs of RAM is all I'll need for Vista

Of course, surprise surprise, the first thing that hit me in my face was the Microsoft booth. They had some guy demoing... Visual Studio.NET? First off it's not that good and I don't know how many people care. They were doing a lot of Vista demos. They had game kiosks and other general Vista kiosks. It does look nice. The theme is especially nice. The angled cascaded window alt-tab thing is also pretty cool. There wasn't that much in the way of animation though and other than the theme it doesn't hold a candle to xgl/aiglx & compiz/beryl. There was a tiny fade-in animation when you ran a program but other than that, it was the same Windows. The only difference is the nice theme. Office 2007 was actually way better. That ribbon, even though a bit overhyped, is really a step above the previous version. The machine in the booth though had Mozilla Firefox on it which was hilarious. I think it had it and someone took it off the box because the desktop shortcut was still there but the icon wasn't right. When you look at the system control panel applet though the machine that was running it had 2 GIGS OR RAM on it! and a 150 gig hard drive. I was like oh, so I need 2 gigs of ram for a nice theme to run smoothly? The only way I would get this is if it came with a new machine that I bought. I wonder if Windows' market share will force all OEM hardware to upgrade accordingly so everyones running these super machines for the most menial of tasks. That would mean that the next low-end machine that I get wouldn't be all that low-end at all and I when I blast Windows off it, it would have a fast Linux distro running on a gig of RAM probably. This would really help the market share of linux because everyone is going to put Linux on these old machines. The question is whether people would do that and get a new Vista machine or do that instead of getting a new machine.

They also had a set of Xbox and Windows games kiosks all looking good. Then there was the PC Mag Digital Village. They had some nice stuff and a big ol Windows Media Center. Those things are huge. There was a massive gaming league playing there as well. The MGL I think. On walking back down from there there was another Xbox kiosk showing off the Xbox live arcade games. They had Galaga, Doom, Street Fighter, Lumines. Very nice.

Finally a playable version of playstation

Then there was the Sony section. They had the Blu-ray discs and their nice Bravia TVs and finally they PS3 there. They had some movies showing and they had some NBA game on and Resistance:Fall of Man running and both playable. It looks good but it doesn't really look much better than Xbox 360 at this point. Resistance looked really nice and it gathered a cowd but it's interesting to see how tepid the whole display was in comparison to how ubiquitous Xbox 360 is at this point. Its strange to see how we live a world where Playstation is not king for once. Now if only it wasn't Microsoft to be stealin it from them. I guess its the usual situation where the leader in a market stumbles and drops the ball and Microsoft who hammers at every market, grabs it.

GAMES GAMES and MORE GAMES

To be honest the rest of the expo wasn't all that, at least that's not how I perceived it compared to last year. There was however a lot of games. Final Fantasy was playable. It was nice. There was a DDR competition. Sega had their games there. EA had their games there. Sierra had their games there. Everybody was playable. All the PC makers were there. Dell and Alienware, HP and Voodoo, Toshiba. Intel was there. Tivo was there. Dell had a booth for Alienware and for their gaming PCs.

I finally understood why Linux isn't there yet in getting the desktop: Games. Now you quite literally can use your typical Linux distro for anything you want. ANYTHING. Pretty easily too. Except games. And for that reason a huge 14-35 male market is squirming away from using it as the primary desktop. I really want my Linux distro to run games. Now perhaps Wine will save us from this if a free tool like Wine Tools can make it easy. Crossover is a hard sell to regular consumers who would only be intersted cuz the distro is free as in beer in the first place. The important thing is to make Linux gaming a typical user experience. That can only really come with Linux games. There's not nearly enough work done in it and that's where the real problem in the Linux desktop lies. Not so much that it's not there yet, but that not enough is being done on it. There's no Linux game port outsourcer like Aspyr is for Mac. That's what we need.

HD-DVD had a big ole truck. I really can't tell the difference between Blu-ray and HD-DVD although I do think HD-DVD will gain a tiny bit more traction. It doesn't look any better though. If any thing it will just make us get both an Xbox 360 and PS3. So it's business as usual. EA did have a Wii there playable for its Madden on Wii. I wonder why Nintendo wasn't there. I didn't take many pictures, since it was a lot of the same and I think its basically impossible to take pictures indoors with this thing. It was a huge pain. There was also another gaming league doing its thing called GGL. MGL was more console-looking and GGL was more PC looking. Both were massive.

The little things were more interesting

The really nice little interesting things were the small accessory stuff in a section of the floor. There were a bunch of ipod sticker covers. There was a really nice one called Gelaskins which had really strikingly cool designs. They didn't support any and every device though so I didn't hold them in high regard. There was the etchamac though who're named like the name podcast. Their name has nothing to do with Macs just as the name 'podcast' has nothing to do with iPods. I should've asked how they work, whether you have to mail them your device. I don't know if I want to part with it for any time just for that. There was another iPod sticker cover that wasn't all that great but they had screen covers to which was good.

The Tivo people were very quite. They just had a nice looking box there. Tivo really does have a nice interface. When I was talking to the guy though I realise that I would want to setup MythTV one of these days instead. It just doesn't go deep enough for those little things like codec support for podcasts. The iSee was there which is a nice idea. It's that thing where you insert your old iPod into it and use it as a harddrive of sorts for the video functionality that it provides. There was also a device called Soundcast that provided stereo functionality with two docks. One for your existing stereo and one for the iPod. THe iPod dock would wirelessly stream music anywhere to the dock hooked to the stereo. The Pepper Pad as also there. As far as Kitchen Computers go it's nice but it's basically linux on a very small computer. All the apps on it are basically the same ones in a linux distro. Even the error popup dialog that came up in the browser, which was Firefox, had the old fedora theme. The Amazon online bookstore functionality was nice though. I could see myself using it for some books. It was a bit slow though. The Neuros OSD was also there. Now this is a nice device. It's small and basically records and encodes your TV shows to look at it any and everywhere that you want. Unlike the Pepper Pad it actually looks really nice. and it's fairly cheap. Calling it OSD(Open Source Device) has a dual effect though. It highlights that it's meant to be constantly evolving so it can't immediately be defined yet, but on the flip side that's also a problem. How do you explain what it does to somebody? It does look really good though.

There was also a web/mobile service called Frucall. It's basically The Book Burro Firefox extension but for everything. The way it works is that you call in the Frucall number and enter the UPN bar code of the item and they tell you how much it costs in other places. Brilliant idea. I wonder how long it'll be before they start jamming cellphones in stores because of these people.

dl.tv meetup

I tried to show up for the dl.tv meetup and it was a nice small little shindig. It basically Roger Chang, Robert Heron, Patrick Norton and that other guy: the Ziff Davis VP standing up and fans huddled around in a circle basking in the vidcasting glory that was these guys. They didn't let me have the wristband to get drinks, but the tender still gave me one. That beer hit me like a tonne of bricks for some reason. It wasn't all that interesting, although Patrick Norton had cool things to say.

Ah hah it STILL crashes :P

At this point I'm ready to go home. On the way out. What do I see but unsurpurisingly a frozen Vista box. Hilarious. All in all a good day. I need sleep though. Too many colours and sounds.

Spilling my guts

2006-10-11T11:01:00.000-04:00

I have a Creative Writing class this semester. I don't really have an opinion on it either way but I went into the class interested in it. I figure from all this writing that I do on this blog that I'd be at least fairly good at it. It's such a laid back class though. We basically get to write stuff every class and then she gushes about how awesome is the thing that we just wrote regardless of whether it was crap or gold. As the class has been going on we all sorta come to the realisation that this writing is a very personal process. We'd be reading out things that we wouldn't otherwise be telling anyone, not that its a secret but its not something that would come up in conversation. Today's class was no exception. We had to write a letter to ourselves that would have been read by a person of our selection that would be describing ourselves. In doing so we are to write something in the letter that that person wouldn't otherwise know about ourself. Now how much MORE personal could you get? So I didn't really want to write it to begin with. Once I do actually start, I don't write it as well as I want to either. What I wanted to do was to try to be light-hearted about it and not describe too much about myself while still making a fairly profound statement about myself so I could still get that gushing effect. Instead it has a bit too much personal information about myself and it wasn't finished nor was it that good. So once I get into class and I hear some of these other letters now I'm thinking 'okay, this is not the letter I would want to write' So I'm scribbling something else and eventually I rephrase this letter, read it out and it's liked.

Fast forward to this afternoon and only then do I realise what I just wrote. I basically made a worse version of the letter that read better but had even more personal information in it. I basically put my guts out in front of everyone. I realise now how much writing is a personal thing. I would hate to be the relative of a writer. You'd be reading their novel and they write a character that's basically you and they make you look bad. It'd be like having a passive aggressive argument. I think that I like writing now though. I still don't think I'm any good at it, but the class exercises will get published at the end of the semester. Perhaps you might be able to read it *shudders* maybe not.

You can take that finger and poke your eye out with it

2006-10-05T12:47:00.000-04:00

There was a guy sitting opposite to me in the train on the way home. It was on the end of the train car and it was crowded around 3 in the afternoon. It was the two chairs that were opposite each other that only seated two guys. The guy sat there kinda sprawled out with his bag next to him. We reached the Canal Street stop and an old Asian guy went to sit next to him and he had to move his bag. He looked visibly pissed about it and its not courteous to have the bag next to you. He was clearly not justified in his expression and I'm doing my usual maceauing and I guess he notices. My face betrays what I'm thinking and he gives me the finger. For a split second I recoiled in fear. Immediately after that I wanted to just lunge at him and fucking break his neck. His ignorance just got me so pissed. What a massive dick. So of course I didn't break his face in, and in classic nerdy fashion I'm blogging on it. I hope he gets whats coming to him. What I love though is how immigrant Asians don't give a crap. They will push you aside no matter if its 3 inches of space and make a seat.

Nextfest!

2006-10-05T12:45:00.000-04:00

I went to Nextfest! I went to Nextfest! nah-ne-nah-nee-naa-naa! ... Okay forget I just consciously typed that. Wired Nextfest is a world's fair of the future. This is the first time that I've ever been to one and it was freeking awesome. I don't know if this is the first one but it is annual. It was crammed with neat things a lot of which were designed to make you stand in front of a screen and behave like an idiot. From the moment I walked in, I saw a bunch of spheres hanging from the ceiling which these spinning cubes projected onto them being control by someone with mouse. Next to that was the fastest electric car in the world. After that was a Musical "device" made of a wall of lasers that made a sound when you put your hand to break the beam. Next to that was the pseudo-3d projector made of a grid of LEDs that lit to form the illusion of a 3d space. And all this was just the entrance!

Once you walked in there was a GE booth with this massive screen and a relaxing area next to that. A left turn takes you to the 'Future of Design' area. There was a lot of MIT Media Labs projects there. The first one was a pseudo-mirror that was a mosaic of sorts. I assume there was a camera that would make a mosaic of the image but instead of just blocks each block was made of a feed of live cable tv. So your image would consist of a bunch little TVs. It was weird. Pretty much every booth was like this, and I'm starting to realize that its difficult to blog about since everything takes a lot of sentences to describe. Next to that was a screen where you could travel through time. It was a screen with an image of a cityscape and when you pressed into it the part where you pressed rewound into a past version of itself at night. When you pressed it all crazy-like the image would behave accordingly. Again, hard to describe. There was also a new design for an automatic door that was made of a bunch of little doors stacked up on each other, so when you walked through it would open up as big as your silhouette. It's meant to conserve energy since the door would open up only as big as you are. There was also a vending machine where the buttons were also a puzzle game. There was another pseudo-mirror that I mentioned in the previous post and it was bunch of little discs where the radius was a gradient from white to black and it would spin to the corresponding darkness of the image in front of it, so when you stood in front of it it your image would be there. Then there was the huggable suit. It's a shirt-suit with strips of cloth in the arms with sensors in them. So you'd hug yourself and it would 'record the hug' and send the details to someone's phone. There was also the only realistic thing there, a handbag with solar panels that would do two things. One would be to have the inside walls of the bag light up when you open it and the other would be that you can plug in and charge devices in the bag. That actually sounds like something somebody would want to buy. So folks this is what you do when you go to MIT. I wish I went there.

Then there was the 'play' section. Everything here had a huge crowd. There was the game of pong projected on a wall where you controlled the paddled with your hands. There was the game of pong that was 'first-person pong' so to speak where the view was like an fps. It was two monitors, with each attached to rotating steel beams that were opposite each other. Imagine it looking like a clock from a top-down view with two hands with monitors on the end of them. You would move the monitors around and each one would be like a first-person view into the pong world and the monitor would be the paddle and you have to move the monitor to hit the ball. This ones especially painful to describe because I have no pictures. It was dark in there and it was a pain in the ass to take pictures of anything. Then there was Kick Ass Kung Fu which had a huge line all day. It was basically a fighting game projected on two screens. One in front and behind you. You'd stand on the mat and it would put you in the game and your movement would be in the game. You'd turn around and face the back screen to turn the character around and face left instead of right. Nothing made people move around more than this. It was awesome. Then there was a wall with climbing grips in them that lit up. For the game, the grips would light up to represent falling eggs and you had to touch the egg before it fell. I tried this an was huffing and puffing like I just played an hour of DDR once it was over. Then there was the Nabaztag choir. A bunch of Nabaztags singing a chorus. Then there was 'virtual taste' where they electronically simulated taste. Again, hard to describe.

Those two sections combined were as good as the rest of the expo. Saturn had their ethanol cars, there was also had some army stuff. There was robot bartender. They also had that nurse exo-skeleton suit, but the demo hadn't started. The coolest thing in the medical section was a machine that looked at your veins. You'd put your hand underneath it and it would shine an image of your blood vessels onto your hand. Apparently it would shine infra-red light onto you and the hemoglobin in your blood vessels would absorb it while the rest of the tissue would reflect it. That reflected image would then be read and shone back onto your hand in regular light. By this time I've wandered into Robot Row. Practically everything there was Japanese or Korean. They had the robot with einstein's head. He was big star attracting lots of crowds. He was moving around and doing sign language and taking voice commands. They had little robots nearby that were cool. It was a Japanese guy's project and its niche was that they had realistic knees and as such was able to move around more flexibly. He was walking around all non-chalantly and kicking balls and standing on one foot. Then there was the robotic DJs which were like big car robots which were just one limbs that moved the LPs and scratched the discs and stuff. By this time all this coolness has my ears bleeding. They also had robot seals whose only purpose was to be cute for therapeutic purposes and it would move around when you petted it. It's always funny to see females melt at the sight of cute things. There was also a bunch of hands that moved realistically.

Littered around the whole room was a bunch of Blackberry booths. The Blackberry Pearl was nice. It really looks like a phone. A very sexy phone. I wonder if it works in Linux. Next to robot row, was a little Intel booth pimping their Core Duo. They had a bunch of Dells boxes running Half-Life 2. The boxes were such monoliths. Who would want such a giant computer? Every machine had a line. So of course, me who hasn't played an fps in a year was in line and ended up waiting for close to an hour. I realize though, once you're an fps gamer it never leaves you. From the time I did get to play I was smoking dudes left and right. It felt nice. So in the midst of all these futuristic wondrous things I was playing Half-Life 2. Once that was over the gaming left a rather unpleasant throbbing in my left wrist. All the walking around was growing tiresome so I didn't appreciate the space area. Virgin had a model of their Virgin Flight two or whatever its called that'll be sending civilians into space. They had a bunch of future space suits and a cool centaur-like rover with a robot human part that I presume someone would be controlling. By this time, I've covered most of room. The green section had a 'green house' and by green I mean most of it was made with cardboard or grass. There was a nice windmill. Walking back to the play area there was an air hockey that was projected. So you'd be flinging your hands at an image of a puck. Everybody was huddled around flailing hands at a desk. My final wandering was into the lecture that had some space dudes talking spacey things. I heard someone say Linux and Python so I beelined. I think it was the guy developing the Linux powered rovers. The talk was long done by the time I sat down so I just didn't bother. Oh and there was a big unicycle bike thing.

The whole day was awesome, except for the fact that I missed the Free Culture NYU protest at The Apple Store on 5th Avenue(the one with the cube). It was at 3 and was an hour and a half. I didn't leave The Javits Center and get to the Apple Store till close to 5 and instead of a DRM protest in front of the Apple Store there was a choir of... christians I guess singing hymns and holding up signs. So I instead went into the Apple Store and read newsfeeds and e-mail for an hour. If Apple Computer is good for anything its free internet in those stores. Unless all those machines have keyloggers and they know everybody's password.

Songbird in Crossover

2006-10-03T15:43:00.000-04:00

What's the same between these two screenshots? Well they're running Songbird of course. What else is different? Well they're both running the Windows version of Songbird courtesy of the Crossover 6 beta in Ubuntu's case. This is the first time I ever tried any iteration of Wine and my jaw was hanging out thinking "Wow it actually works" This plays music and stuff. Of course its an unsupported app on an unsupported beta based on Wine which is still beta so obviously its as fragile as papier mache. The window seemed to remain always on top, even on top of its own dialog boxes which was annoying. Many other things I tried to install either didn't run or didn't work right although those few apps included the video converter/player for my iAudio which I'm sure is no trivial task for Wine. I can imagine once Wine reaches version 2 in another few years it'll be awesome. In any case Half-Life, Steam and World of Warcraft are among its supported apps. Maybe I should try half-life again to see if it works.

Two movies and two meetings (well three meetings actually)

2006-10-03T15:33:00.000-04:00

In the past two weeks, I've been to two movies and went to a few user group meetings as of left. I'm starting to get used to the idea of going to such things now that I have extra free time since I'm not working anymore. Last weekend I went to see two movies, both were extremely cool. Pretty much everybody should go see Jet Li's Fearless and This Film is Not Yet Rated. This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a documentary about how crappy the MPAA ratings board is and by extension how crappy the MPAA is in general. The argument that the movie puts forward is basically that the MPAA is just a front for big movie studio interests, something that doesn't surprise me. The thing with the ratings board is that is essentially just a pappy show. The members are kept secret and they have no disclosure. They make completely arbitrary decisions and mistreat independent filmmakers and are terrified of sex, but let abhorrent violence slide right through. The filmmaker comically outlines these topics and proceeds to uncover the names of the ratings board members. Along the way he touches on other wonderful MPAA contributions to society like copyright extensions and the DMCA and the movie studios agenda of legally locking down culture. It is quite funny and quite poignant. Bittorrent it if you have to, see it in the cinema if you can, anyway to get the message out. Sign this petition while you're at it. The craziest thing about that movie is that 3/4 into it, I kid you not, I could not make this up, the crazy dude from the Internet cafe walked into the theater. He sat in my row at the opposite end of it. Somewhere near the end of the movie he made a loud random noise and then got up and walked out. I sat frozen in my seat for the remainder of the movie from that point.

Jet Li's Fearless is frickin awesome. It's been mentioned in the same breath as Crouching Tiger, House of the Flying Daggers and Hero. All those movies are visual feasts, with beautiful colour choices but the stories were all fairy tales that were kinda far out. It's like Soap Opera stories a little bit, it's very enthralling but it's separated from reality quite a bit. Fearless is not like that. It's a very simple story but a much more real one with more realistic characters and not so much hearyfeary wirework. It's about a reckless head of a wushu school whose shenanigans get him in trouble and he learns from his mistakes along the way. Some have said that it lulls in the middle, but I thought the pacing was near perfect. You really understand how Jet Li's character's thinking changes as the movie carries on.

I went to a python user group meeting the other day. Not much to say. People spent most of the time lazing around hunched over the laptops reading out of Dive Into Python. The next meeting would be better, but I still thought it was nice to be around real geeks for awhile. I also went to this month's LUG meeting again. This was another good one with two guests and a more relaxed atmosphere. People were sprawled out on the chairs listening to Jack Aboutboul talk about different desktop art and design open source projects, gimp, inkscape, blender that sorta stuff. Apparently Blender's been used in actual commercial films. He said a guy who knew who worked at a studio usedit for parts of the Spiderman and Fantastic Four movies. The FF movie used it in the fire truck scene. The poor movie was so forgettable, that I don't remember any such scene. He talked about that java-based programming environment that was pretty cool. I've now completely forgotten the name of it which sucks but it allowed you to quickly make little graphical applets that did pretty things. Finally he talked about this little light sensor chip thing. He touched on how a dude at nyu used it to make a wooden mirror. Apparently it would sense the amount of dark in the image and tilt the wooden block pixels accordingly. That guy had another thing like that at Wired Nextfest but instead of wood it would use little discs with different shades of gray on different of the disc. The disc would rotate to fit. It's hard to really explain how cool it was. It had to be seen. He then had Fred Benenson from Free Culture NYU on talking about Creative Commons and free culture. The whole meeting by this point is really relaxed, everybody's chillin. He touched on all the little stuff, not having much time to go deep but it was nice to hear the talk. He mentioned the next protest being done with Defective by Design that following Saturday. I missed it which really annoyed me. I was at the Nextfest and got up too late to go to both in time and I already had the Nextfest ticket for Saturday only. By the time I got to the Apple Store on 5th avenue it had long ended and there was a choir from a church in front singing praises.

Finally there's the meeting at the New York Library with Chris Anderson and Lawrence Lessig on the Long Tail. I remember when I first walked in to the big hall, my first impression was. I'm nothing like these people. These people have nice shoes and clean shirts, and their hair's been combed. I share none of these traits. Apparently the New York Library talks were a series in and of themselves and this was one of them. I assume that was the usual crowd for this sort of stuff. Basically Chris Anderson did a presentation on The Long Tail and then he and Lawrence Lessig had an onstage conversation on the whole issue. Everything was familiar from the book except in visual form. The whole thing ringed of anticipation for a new kind of cultural democracy. It was very enticing. The fun part was when Lessig showed some of his example videos in a sophisticated audience they're showing a Jesus musical and amvs.

All in all I'm meetinged out. With any luck I'll get to attend a few more before it turns into winter. If you want you could check out my NYPL and NYLUG meeting photosets from my photos on flickr.

Losing that Trininess

2006-10-03T15:31:00.001-04:00

It's been 2 years. I wonder just how much I've changed in such time. I think that I've changed a lot in some ways for the better and in other ways not so much. My initial fear however is that all in all, I'm missing the Trinidadianism that made me. What makes me shudder is that with each passing day that I walk on a land and breathe air that doesn't belong to t&t and expose myself to less of it on a day by day basis, that I'll lose whatever it is that made me what I am. I suppose I could read the news and blogs and keep up with things that way and while that is better than nothing I get the feeling that that shall not suffice. I think that posts a somewhat distorted view of things, a view by proxy, that's been thought-shifted and processed to be something a little bit different from what I would have seen had I been there myself. I think the worst thing about that is that over time my view can become anachronistic, detached from the way things really are. My aunt is like that I think. She came here in the 40s when we were still a British colony. Things are nothing from how she remembers and declares it to be. Unfortunately some things haven't changed that much at all.

When I think about it though, I've nothing to worry about. I've become more appreciative of my home now that I've left. That happens to some who are uprooted from one place like that. I listen to more Calypso now than I ever did back home. Of course that has a lot to do with the fact that there's more Trinis here than in Trinidad itself. Of course none of this may matter since I may just find myself back home by this time next year. I'm sure once that happens I'll wish I was back where was wishing I was home.

Reserving my seat in hell

2006-10-03T15:29:00.001-04:00

I've been scanning my Aunt's old pictures for awhile now. She'd give me the pictures that she'd be willing to part with for awhile and I would sneak into the library and sit at the scanner quietly scanning away using the school's resources. One day I went to scan and there was a woman sitting at the desk but not using the scanner or the computer for that matter, she was typing away in Word on a laptop on her lap. I pulled up some resolve to ask the lady to step aside even though I'm not entirely justified.

"Hello, excuse me, are you using the machine?"
"No"
umm...
"Would it be possible to use the scanner?"
By this time I recognize the trini accent
"Yes"
ummm...
"Are you using it right now?"
"I was going to use it but the software that I need isn't on it"
"Would it be okay for me to use the scanner?"
"Hold on"
"Thank You"

I step aside and I wonder why was this woman so daft. She takes a really long time to get up and I'm not losing my patience but I wonder what I'm missing in this situation. She gets up and then I see her cane. Wait a sec... Did I just kick a blind lady out of her seat? Oh dear. Of course I feel really bad and I want to help her but then I feel that ambivalence that I feel with blind people. You want to help them but you don't know if they want the help and if the wrong moves would be considered babying them and they'd take offense or that you confuse them even more. I helped her unsuredly as she left the library entirely and left me wondering just how I manage to get myself in such a situation. I sat down and proceeded to scan.

Polite People

2006-10-03T15:28:00.003-04:00

You know people complain that its a sign that society is breaking down when young people are no longer polite to their elders. People no longer have concern for their fellow man and we're all self-absorbed and selfish. They're wrong and they're idiots.

In one of my classes there's this guy that I knew from work last semester. He's the most effusively polite person I ever met. It's fine I guess but sometimes it drives me freaking crazy. He'd make a point of shaking everybody's hand when he went in a room and would ask me with an unsettling degree of sincerity, 'how are you doing?', as if he expected me to break down and spill my guts to him right there on the spot and he had some responsibility to solve my problems. You know what, 6 times out of 10 I'm not feeling all that spectacular, thanks for asking. Furthermore, sometimes I just want to be left alone, that's when I really hate polite people. It makes me wonder why we even ask that question of each other if we're only going to reasonably give the same answer each and every time. I think it would be silly if we were genuine about things to each other all the time. Full disclosure is good but between persons who're strangers it leads to more misunderstandings than its worth. Some people just don't get how other people work and people are just different like that. People are only sincere when we're friends so that's the only time "How are you?" means anything. hmm... I don't know where I'm going with this, I just had to say something.

I wonder if I'll get myself in trouble?

2006-10-03T15:28:00.001-04:00

I remember reading something about employers checking for blogs of new hires and finding their blogs of them as students saying things that might be incriminating somehow. The students then find themselves in an unpleasant spot and don't get hired for some reason. I wonder if I've said enough to put me in such a position. I don't remember actually saying my name here, although most everyone that reads may have figured it out by now. I'd like to think that I've been sincere, perhaps too sincere? Oh well, if I have then damage has been done.

No TB for me

2006-10-03T13:12:00.001-04:00

Good news world. I do not have tuberculosis.

I got a letter from the school the other day saying that somebody in a class last semester got it so there's a teensy chance of myself and to be sure, to come down for a tuberlin (or is it tuberculin?) test. I remember reading the letter, thinking WTF? people still get that disease? how do you get it? wow. I remember forgetting to tell my aunt and she was like 'doh make joke with that one nah. that is deat' So a while later I went for the test. I was starting to feel real nervous about it eventually even though I had no reason to. As i sat there I was joking around with the lady over the needle. Ever since I almost blacked out that time I gave blood, me and needles have been a little bit weary of another. There's a part where I was trying to numb myself to the sensation and the nurse just stood there watching me thinking I was gonna faint, and I was like "I'm HERE" jeez, stick me already. Before that I fidgeted at her first attempt so the 2 minutes were certainly interesting. The little spot on my foreman swelled up into a little bump and needless to say I was little concerned, but two hours it shrunk, and that was the last I saw of it, which is what it was supposed to do thankfully. 2 Days later I came back and the woman checked my arm and I was fine.

Now all I have to do is resolve my carpal tunnel, headcold and this lump in my lip from when I bussed meh lip.

The man who saved the world

2006-09-27T11:23:00.001-04:00

Let all lift our glasses for the man who saved the world. It would have been World War III without him.

The Long Tail

2006-09-25T10:26:00.001-04:00

I just finished reading The Long Tail. It's a really interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone. To anyone that doesn't know The Long Tail is basically describing economies of scale in relation to technology but in reverse. In other words, The Long Tail is where technology brings the cost of selling things down to a point thats low enough so that unpopular things can now be sold. Combined with economies of scale it can make a viable business opportunity. The main technology that the Long Tail applies to is the Internet, where it replaces retail space which is far more expensive. The examples that the book quotes throughout is Amazon, iTunes, Rhaposdy and Netflix. In all these companies a third or more of their sales comes from unpopular items(It's called the Long Tail because the sales figures on a graph for all the items sorted by highest to lowest is a curve that starts high and curves downards to near zero for a long time but never really reaching zero). By making the retail space virtual, removing themselves from geographical constraints, Internet companies can accomplish this. This is compared to something like Walmart where they still use technology to streamline themselves but they still bound by expensive retail space. Immediately I thought that this is a good concept to apply to a small country like Trinidad and Tobago. In an island of only 1.3 million everything you do is Long Tail, well anything interesting anyways. This lays out a big opportunity for e-commerce that should be considered. I think the only thing holding us back is the lack of payment options for Trinis and less than stellar execution of most of such sites. I think it really is important to consider though. One thing that was interesting is that it outlined the fact that filters like search engines, recommendation engines, and the blogosphere serve as the automated form of the word of mouth that bring an audience to exactly what they want. Otherwise that Long Tail of unpopular products is just a sea of crap that obfuscates and confuses. Another interesting point that the book outlined is that net companies that can take advantage of The Long Tail can take a different approach to business where instead of trying to predict what people want and having a sparse assortment of products, you can just give everybody everything and let them choose what they want because the overhead of doing that is negligible. This is especially with digital products like music where that overhead is just a few more bits on a capacious hard drive.

Not asked back

2006-09-22T19:47:00.001-04:00

I got fired the other day. Properly fired. My first time. I was looked into by a glass eye and the mouth a little bit below it said 'No'. For some reason for a fraction of a moment I thought about the debate that goes on in society about violent media's influence on people. I thought conservatives must be wrong because she just said 'No' and I feel fine. Much later I'm in complete in agreement because those two uttered letters proceeded to have a drastic impact on me. I didn't feel it at first, but from the moment I stepped outside, I could feel everything change. It was slow at first but the real feelings steadily crept up into the forefront of my mind. It was like I was crumpled up like one of those aluminium cans that one likes to step on before its thrown away. I felt like I wanted to crumple myself up in a ball and scream blood curdlingly with all my might. Rejection. Those two letters bloomed into a long exposition about my own inadequacies as if told by someone I dearly loved. My confused demeanour for the rest of the day felt like I got a simultaneous punch to the gut and the face. I can remember replaying every nanosecond of every gesture of the conversation in my mind, analysing every twitch, every muscular contraction, trying to figure out what it all meant. Not very much of such interpretation produced optimistic conclusions. I remember there was a shrug in the conversation. That part particularly stung. "You" was said a lot too. Each utterance felt like a tonne of bricks piled onto my shoulders. My behaviour brought me back to the time I got my result for Computer Science in A-Levels. Uggh, Another dubious milestone I'd rather not relive, yet here I was. I can remember back then the helplessness was the worst part. I don't think now was as bad as that. It was just as exhausting though. I felt drained by the end of the day. I spent the trek home drowning myself in the loudest rock and metal buried in my iAudio, trying to coil myself in it so I don't hear myself destroying what meager shreds of self-esteem were left. I remember last time walking brought me back to reality. I think I walked from school in town all the way home. That was a long walk. I definitely needed to walk away again this time, but I didn't have the immediate luxury. Once I got home I watched Scarface. Completely insignificant to my situation but it was the first time I saw it and it was awesome. Along the way I tried to explain away what just happened to me, and tried to analyse it in a bit more empirical fashion understanding what the real honest motivations were on their side and understanding my faults and trying to internalise it, to learn from it. These only had minor palliative effects at the time. I also try to say "I never liked it anyways" "wasn't a nice place" trying to bring down my imaginary opponent, even though I never would say such things in an alternate dimension. Like grabbing at straws. I need to digest this day, sort out what I really need to understand of this day, I need to walk away.

I have to admit though this is one of the better paragraphs I've ever conceived(I think at least). At the very least there's an above average frequency of big words.

Most of the month of August

2006-09-09T18:52:00.001-04:00

I just had a vacation. It was one month. How did it go? Well it started with a two weeks of PS2. GTA:Vice City & Liberty City Stories, Prince of Persia:Warrior Within, God of War and a bunch of others. God of War has got to be the greatest adventure game I've ever played on a PS2. The sheer rage and pain that can be dealt in that game is fantastic. The graphics felt like they were being delivered by UT2004 not a PS2 game. As for PoP, I've been a fan of the Prince since I was a kid and that game did not disappoint. It's amazing how well they incorporate the level design into the architecture.

There were a bunch of movies that I also saw. Snakes on a Plane, Scoop, Little Miss Sunshine, Accepted, Crank. I recommend any of these movies to anyone. Scoop was my first taste of Woody Allen humour. He was hilarious. Scarlett Johannsen wasn't all that bad (to look at) either. She played a geeky reporter girl from Brooklyn. Funny since she slept with someone like three times in the movie (you don't see anything). My favourite line in it was "My anxiety is like aerobics". The ending was also funny too. My lip was messed up when I saw it so it was uncomfortable to laugh. Little Miss Sunshine was also very cool. It had such unique characters as well. The ending involved a children's pageant which was very disturbing. The children had on more makeup than most adults and they were like little freaks of nature. It's an interesting backdrop for the comedy that ensues. Crank was really awesome. It was like watching a videogame. The story was very quest-like like a videogame, and it was so over-the-top, it's unbelievable (kinda like GTA).

I spent most of my days however bored or alone. Everyone else had somewhere to be. I wished I was in Trinidad, but I couldn't do much about that. I found myself going to the city and walking about in Lower Manhattan looking for things to do. Didn't find very much to be quite honest. At least, nothing that blew my mind. There were a few places that I visited, but all in all I was restless everyday. I did get some reading done, but not much. I did buss my lip which really sucks too. I spent most days lamenting about nothing in particular. I feel as if something is missing in my life. I have no idea what. I wish I understood and could fix myself that way. oh well.

Why (I thought) Ubuntu is better than Windows

2006-09-09T18:51:00.003-04:00

Well more accurately its what struck me as better about Ubuntu from initially using it as a new Linux user. So since its from my initial experience its primarily interface and usability observations. I also don't know where exactly kudos should be placed for any of these observations, whether it's just things about gnome or they're Ubuntu customisations or gnome features that were sent upstream and started out as Ubuntu customisations. I don't know whether other distros using gnome, like Fedora, have these features.

Why Ubuntu is better than Windows (Out of the box)

When the program does the previews of videos it takes it from a random frame as opposed to the first frame so it's actually meaningful rather than completely useless the way it is in Windows. When Windows does it, it always takes it from the first frame which in practically every video clip is black so every preview is black. It doesn't do it in Ubuntu. That's nice.

In ubuntu, you can wheel scroll in non-focused windows. Now you may not fully appreciate the gravity of how awesome that is but it really is a superior little flourish. I like arranging multiple windows on the screen in a desperate attempt to multi-task my way to multitasking nirvana. Thus I can keep a vlc window at the forefront in the corner of the screen while the non-focused firefox window can still be scrolled. When comparing two documents they can be scrolled in close tandem next to each other without clicking repeatedly.

It comes with Tetris. I've long since gotten tired of Minesweeper.

The configurability of the panels in gnome completely stomps the taskbar in Windows. It's really easy to bend it to your will.

It must be that I always expect something to break because its Linux and I'm a newbie but the Ubuntu team consistently find ways to answer the call for usability. So many little flourishes that present the paradigm to be as easy as any other desktop OS. Add/Remove Programs? Update Manager? Graphical deb Installer? Graphical LiveCD Installer? Yes!

Why Windows is better than Ubuntu (Out of the box)

Totem is shall we say, a load of cacapoo. Always use vlc.

We always like to talk about how any halfways decent linux distro comes out-of-the-box with more useful user apps than any other OS. Ubuntu is prime example of that. kick butt openoffice, gimp, gaim, evolution. but no mp3 really blows. That really is the first thing I head to on any computer is music and while I've ripped all music purchased subsequent to starting to use ubuntu to oggs, all the other music from before that are still as mp3. And what about all the podcasts that insist on putting out mp3s. On a fresh system all I can listen to is a few albums I bought recently(Orange Sky, Skid"Nevely, Tripped and Falling), all the linux podcasts (tllts, lugradio, linuxreality and a lot more) and a few tech podcasts (engadget, twit).

Linux Package Management Systems aren't really built for offline situations. If I wanted to download a program from somewhere else, say cowbell. Easy enough, except I need mono which is 4 extra files and there's a bunch of other libs as well. So the whole Windows thing of downloading a program from a site to install and run it isn't a definite thing. This sucks for people with dialup which is still a lot of people in Trinidad. What I would like to see is a package download script that would incorporate into current Package Management schemes and which could be run from any computer. So, say it's a website service then. If you go to a Linux download site, you could choose to download a program with not just that package but all the other dependencies that don't already get installed with a specific distro out of the box. So if I choose to download cowbell, the site or an extra implementation somehow would download all the other dependencies for ubuntu and package it together a write an install script. Then when I go to the offline machine, I could double click that one file, that would then install all the dependency debs for the program as are needed then install the program. And then it would show up in synpatic as having the debs installed. hmm. Now that I've written that down it sounds like more trouble than its worth, but I still think that for a dialup or offline user, installing things in Linux is difficult.

The NYLUG Meeting (Most of the month of August)

2006-09-09T18:51:00.001-04:00

I went to a NYLUG meeting the other day. It was the first time that I've ever really been to an NYLUG meeting from start to finish. I did go to one once before but I was very late and I was rushing to get there, and I didn't know what the guy was talking about and it felt more uncomfortable than I expected, so I left early. That was many months before this visit, and since it's still the summer vacation I had a lot of time on my hands and was early in this case (for once in my life). Immediately upon reaching the floor I was approached by two characters. One was a middle aged geeky looking dude for whom it was also his first visit and the other was also particularly nerdy. He kept doing this impression of Butthead. Or maybe it was Beavis, I'm not entirely sure, but he definitely took getting used to. He sorta looked like a little Beavis character, short with an oddly shaped head. How'd I end up with these two? In any case, the guy eventually opened up the IBM room and I sat and watched people stream in. I didn't know what to expect, but I'll admit there were some stereotypes that held true... to an extent. There was inevitably a large proportion of bearded dudes with beer bellies. I cracked up when I sat there and saw one saunter in with sandals. Long haired, big beard and sandals. wow. Clearly they're all super-smartand knowledgeable sysadmins whose social status I'd rather not think about. There were also only 3 girls. I think one was somebody's girlfriend. Other than that there were different looks sported by everyone. The talk that was made for the lug meeting was a showcase of gentoo linux. The guy did a presentation of what gentoo was and its history, criticisms, advantages etc. He then went through its paces. Watching him bring up ebuilds, and config files and init folders, switching parameters on and off, it's clear that Gentoo is not for the light of heart. I would love to be able to try this distro out one day but I don't have the resources.

Like most linux distros, it's a net connected one. From my limited experience most Linux distros seem to be feasible only once they have access to broadband, for the purposes of updating the distro and installing programs. Installing the distro can be done anywhere but the package management systems seem to work best with broadband net. I have no problem with that expect there's no Internet at my house and most people in Trinidad still have dial-up. It doesn't mean that it can't be done with dialup, but like anything with dialup it would be slow unless some sysadmin magic is done to work around that. And for machines without net its next to impossible to use many package management systems since dependencies have been modified for the sake of efficiency and security (to an extent). That is to say if a program needs certain files to run that other programs would need, that is considered a separate library that the computer figures out you would need and then downloads automatically when you choose to install an app. Fair enough when the machine has direct access to fast net but not easy for a newbie with an offline machine. I recently wanted to install codec support on my laptop which didn't have net from the house and I ended up separately downloading close to 40 little libraries individually off the Ubuntu Package Search website from an Internet cafe. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this but I don't yet know what that is. Furthermore the best solution to that would have to be cross-platform so I could go to a Windows machine if I needed to get an app from there and install something with one click.

Gentoo is a classic example of this. It's a source based distro that you can configure to download EXACTLY only what you need and then compile that source once you have it. The distro install cd itself barely installs anything and you configure it from there. It takes a long time to install anything since compiling and downloading takes forever, but it would be fast and you'd learn a lot about linux since you'd be choosing everything that goes on it. Sounds like a geeks dream. Maybe one of these days I can try it out.

Anyhow aside from that they also pimped out a Python Users Group. That got my attention since I really want to learn that language. I've been reading the Dive Into Python programming book intermittently during the vacation. I'm up to chapter 5 now, and it's starting to get interesting, and by interesting I mean "What the hell is this thing talking about?" So I should like to get more into that. I spoke to the guy there about it and they hold regular classes. Dive into Python and How to think like a Computer Scientist are both freely available online which is cool. Dive into Python even comes with the Ubuntu distro which is neat. Check Synaptic. At the end of it I did meet one fellow geek, hopefully I'll meet someone else next meeting.

It's Ubuntu but with an X

2006-09-09T18:50:00.001-04:00

There are only three computers in the house where I'm at. My laptop, my relative's laptop, and his old computer which he stopped using. As I bang on about in practically every other post, I have Ubuntu on my laptop and I like it. I did install Ubuntu on the other laptop, but he uses AOL and generally isn't a geek so he still goes back to Windows for the time being, generally not interested in trying anything new (Really and truly the blasted AOL dialer & silly software is the only thing stopping him. I'm sure he'd be happy to migrate if AOL worked). He let me have the other old machine which he said wasn't working. When I looked at the machine there was nothing wrong with it, except of course Windows ME which I promptly discarded. The hardware was completely functional and yet it sat in a corner collecting dust. Since then I've used it to try some things. I never did get Slackware working. It wouldn't load X. I was supposed to fix the Xorg.conf, replace it with one from a distro that works. I've tried SuSE which wasn't such a great idea, I should've tried one of the other SuSE desktop environments but even without KDE it generally felt a little slow. I've also tried Fedora which was nice. My Freespire CD, and ISO were corrupted. I KNOW I'm not ready for Gentoo, and I don't want to bother at this point. I did have a nice experience with Fedora and OpenSuSE though. With Fedora, X didn't load on startup but by this point I know what startx means. I guess its more of a all-purpose desktop/server OS, but which is better as a server. Again, my OpenSuSE experience is skewed by the fact that I insisted on trying with its default desktop, KDE which chuggs on this clunker. I should've tried something like WindowMaker which comes on the 5 CDs (!). Anyhow I tried xubuntu recently and without sounding like too much of an Ubuntu fanboy (too late), I am definitely impressed. I didn't know some of these minimalist desktop environments could still deliver so much.

I should say this machine is 933Mhz with 128MB of RAM and xubuntu is ubuntu but with the xfce desktop environment instead of gnome. (Like kubuntu which is the kde ubuntu) I think its a good idea to brand the desktop environment variants slightly differently because a new user who typically associates the user interface with the whole product can understand the differences. Anyways xfce is just amazing. The panel interface is just as configurable as gnome or kde. I currently have it set up exactly the same fashion as my ubuntu desktop with the top panel with the menu and the taskbar, system tray, show desktop etc. and the bottom panel acting as a psuedo-MacOSX dock imitation with an autohidden panel with the big app icons, power button, and workspace switcher. The system imprint is also impressive with it never taking up more than around 80 of the 128MB and the swap space never really going past half. It feels just as fast as my laptop.

It seems that the xfce apps take the approach of craming in around 80-90% of the functionality of the bigger desktop counterparts and cleverly minimalising the interface to reduce the footprint of the app. The app selection is also really nice, there's the abiword word processor, gnumeric for spreadsheets, gaim for IM, gimp for image editing, firefox, thunderbird, the xfburn cd-burner which looks a lot like gnomebaker, gqview which is a very minimal but functional image manager & viewer and xfmedia which is the same thing for a media player. It's even got a calendar program called Orage which I didn't know could be made this minimally. The main window is just the picture of a calendar and you double click days of the month to add events. The dialog that came up looked feature filled though. It's the same kinda things that you get with ubuntu or kubuntu out of the box. And it still is ubuntu linux so you can install whatever you want.

And that's exactly what I did. It's very silly and newbie of me to install large footprint things going against exactly what the distro is trying to do but eh, who cares. Even after installing some apps it still runs just fine. There's Skype, Gizmo, Frostwire and Java by virtue of that, gnome's bittorrent program, Picasa and a local copy of wine by virtue of that, Totem and Rhythmbox all on the system. I can basically use it for anything that I would have otherwise used the laptop for.It does run a bit slower with the gnome apps, totem or rhythmbox running but I had to do that since xfmedia is using the xine engine and the packages that the Ubuntu Starter Guide says to install to get codec support only work on gstreamer apps. Also I wanted to have a music manager on the machine as well. Of course massive things like Frostwire or Picasa are a bad idea to be running but it's fun to have them around. Picasa which uses Wine doesn't even draw the window borders properly and has garbage on-screen on the window edges. There was a point where it ran a bit slower and I realised that it was the Picasa media detector doing it since it was memory resident and as a result had Wine running.

There are some sacrifices that can perplex though. Like xfce in xubuntu has no trash to speak of. You really delete a file when you press delete. ~~There's no speaker applet for the panels either so the only place where you can change the volume is in the individual program playing the sound.~~ It seems I was completely blind because there is a speaker applet I just didn't spot it. Sandy also said that you could type 'alsamixer' in the terminal and that brings up a pseudo-gui speaker utility. And mousepad the xfce text editor doesn't seem to do syntax highlighting. Oh well, there's always vi. I find that in using xubuntu I do use the terminal a bit more though. Also xubuntu and xfmedia didn't seem to detect regular CDs and thus didn't play them. It also didn't come with a CD ripper. Does that mean that it can't play or rip CDs out of the box? They better fix that one. Rhythmbox and Totem which I subsequently installed did see the CD but only Rhythmbox could play it and it could also rip it. Also only one program could use the audio system at a time which wasn't really a big deal. So that meant that if Rhythmbox was playing, then nothing else could play audio at the same time. I assume that it's a minimal technical implmentation that;s the result of that.

Maybe I need to collect more old machines and install Linux on them. I'll finally have the hardware that I want to experiment with and I can stop making excuses. I remember I was supposed to get a very old Mac from the internship where I was working but nothing came of it. Maybe I can harass Roger again about that.

A reason to go to Eastern Parkway (Most of the month of August)

2006-09-09T18:49:00.000-04:00

I finally went to see the West Indian Day Carnival this year on Labour Day. It was nice. Again its an example of one thing that pervades my summer vacation. I'm spending far too much time with myself these days. It's starting to get a little depressing. That was one of the things that hampered the fun. The other thing was the buss lip. As it is right now, the lips healed to the point where all the scabs have fallen off and there is patched skin there now on the inside and outside of my lip so I look just fine now. There is bump on the inside of my lip though and it's very uncomfortable. It initially had me scared but Aunt said that was normal. As I move my mouth around it seems to be getting worse. Typical mouth movements seem to harass it and as it bothers me I would periodically check it but even though it feels big it doesn't actually look swollen at all. Right now the bump on the inside is pretty big and very uncomfortable. In any case it makes eating a laborious activity so that was the other thing. I couldn't eat any of the food. Bake and Shark, Macaroni, Pelau, Baked Chicken and more everywhere and I couldn't eat any of it. Nothing could be more frustrating.

I was very late though, so I can't really say that I saw all that much of the Carnival, making it even more of a non-event. There were lots of vendors selling flag gear. A big Jamaican lady grabbed me by the arm calling me "Japan" and asked me which country she want to buy. I showed her my shirt and I ended up buying a $6 red, black and white belt (!). Never again. It was nice to represent though. I don't think many people believed that I was Trinidadian. Some people gave me odd glances like they thought I was posing or something.

I only got to see about 3 trucks passing. I went that late to see it. Saw a few masqueraders near the end. The congestion of people meant that you couldn't get to the stage at that point to see the mas passing. In crowd situations the Police are also watching everything hard. I did bump into a school friend which was cool. All in all it was a nice trip although I wish I could've seen more.