bjimba's bjimblog

How long is it? That's a very personal question.

2010-02-10T01:23:00.002-05:00

Good Lord, it's been over a year since my last post here! I mean, not that anyone was waiting for me to post anything. This here ain't a news site, that's for sure. However, I guess that more immediate modes of communication, notably Facebook, have superseded most of my blogging activity. I really should write a nice article on some of my latest experiences with online genealogy. No promises, though.

Theatre: "Not My Daughter" at Rutgers Newark

2009-01-14T01:02:00.003-05:00

My latest acting adventure is a really invigorating one. I'm performing in the world premiere of a play by Ann Mary Mullane, called Not My Daughter. This is the sort of play that I didn't think was being written anymore -- an intelligent comedy along the lines of Sam Spewack, George S. Kaufman, or Neil Simon. (There is, in fact, a lot of gentle poking at Simon's Barefoot in the Park in the script.) We're only doing two performances this time, but it may lead to more in another venue.

Details at the No Apology Theatre website.

TiltShiftMaker.com - online tilt-shifting!

2009-01-14T00:43:00.004-05:00

Okay, this is pretty cool.

I don't know if you've ever seen photos manipulated by a process known as tilt-shifting. Basically, it makes a real-world photograph look like it's a photograph of a miniature model. Well, now you can create your own tilt-shifted photos, really easily, via a website called TiltShiftMaker.

Here's a sample. This is a photo I took during our trip to Australia, of some boats in Sydney Harbor.

Richard Wright 1943-2008

2008-09-16T00:08:00.002-04:00

In the early 1970s, I was in high school, and attended my fair share of high school dances. When the time came for the cover band (yes, we used to have bands at dances, not DJs) to play the slow-dance-with-your-main-squeeze song, there was really only one choice. Us and Them, from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. To this day, I cannot hear that song without thinking fondly of those dances so long ago.

Richard Wright wrote the music for that song, and played the haunting, swirling keyboards on that track and countless other Floyd tracks. He was a brilliant musician who was treated rather shabbily later on in the Floyd saga, but he lives forever on that album (and quite a few others).

Richard died of cancer yesterday. David Gilmour had this to say: "He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognized Pink Floyd sound, I have never played with anyone quite like him."

Thanks for the slow dances, Richard.

New York Times obituary

Open letter to Randall

2008-08-27T02:16:00.004-04:00

Update: Some time after I wrote this rant, Randall went back and fixed the comic. A small victory for the Society for Spelling "Russell" Correctly. Yay!

The latest xkcd pushed one of my flame buttons:

Here's my responding post on the xkcd forum:

Re: "Fetishes" discussion

Post by bjimba on Wed Aug 27, 2008 1:01 am UTC

Et tu, Randall? Or should I say Randal?

95% of the people named Russell spell it with two L's, yet the rest of the world blindly goes on spelling it with one. What's up with that?

Leon Russell.
Bill Russell.
Rosalind Russell.
BERTRAND RUSSELL.
Gail Russell.
Kimberly Russell.
Jane Russell.
Ken Russell.
Kurt Russell.
Brian Russell. (He was my uncle. He was Potlatch the cook in "Charlie and the Lonesome Cougar".)
Lillian Russell.
Nipsey Russell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russel

I've been fighting this battle for 51 years. Can you tell?

Sincerely,
Jim "bjimba" Russell. With two L's.
http://bjimba.blogspot.com

Of course, aside from that, I love the concept of this comic. After all, I am a B.S. in Math.

Latest "In Contempt"

2008-08-22T00:26:00.001-04:00

Kevin Moore's web comic, In Contempt, is frequently brilliant, but every once in a while, he really hits it out of the park.

Beatles on the shuffle

2008-07-25T01:55:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, I think my music shuffle is messing with my head.

My entire music library is on disk now, and my computer randomly shuffles through the tunes. I don't categorize anything other than by artist name. So, I assume the computer does not know that, say, John Lennon has any connection with the Beatles.

The last four songs have been:

The Beatles / Magical Mystery Tour
Paul McCartney / Coming up (live version, from All the Best)
John Lennon / Well well well (rehearsal version from a bootleg)
The Beatles / You really got a hold on me (live from Stockholm, from Anthology 1

I'm going to have to look into the Python random routine, which the moosic player uses.

Sydney, Australia

2008-07-05T08:10:00.003-04:00

We're here.

I'm sending this via an internet kiosk in the hotel, so I'll write more when I get home.

Ira Tucker

2008-06-26T23:02:00.003-04:00

It's a common belief that deaths that affect you "come in threes". Now, here's my third obituary post in a row.

Ira Tucker, lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, died on June 24th. He joined the gospel group in 1938, when he was 13. Think about this -- he was with the same singing group for sixty years. The Dixie Hummingbirds were a very important influence on American music. Even if you know very little about gospel, you've heard this man's voice, probably due to this song:

Tucker's obituary in the New York Times

George Carlin

2008-06-24T00:46:00.002-04:00

Back in the day, we used to listen to comedy albums. Really. In the pre-videotape days, we'd gather together at someone's house and just listen to Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Cheech and Chong, or the incomparable George Carlin. Toledo Window Box was one of my favorites.

You got 24 odds and ends, on a table. 23 of them fall off. Whaddaya got, an odd or an end?

Thanks for the laughs, George.

The beat

2008-06-02T23:31:00.003-04:00

Rest in peace, Bo.

Roger Waters: It just came up on shuffle

2008-05-09T00:34:00.002-04:00

I have most of my music collection digitized. From the vinyl LP's I purchased at Two Guys in the '70s to my latest CD's, they're all residing on /alt/media/music on my main server. So, I naturally randomly shuffle through the whole lot while I'm working/playing on the computer. What just came up was Roger Waters / "Who needs information", from the "Radio KAOS" album. I was forced by some subconscious process to turn the speakers up to 11.

"Radio KAOS" was probably considered a failure. I don't care. This is one of those albums that connected to my brain through some back-door direct connection, and I always consider it one of the most important albums of all time. (That, and Badfinger's "Say No More". Another commercial flop, by the way.)

No particular reason for posting this, other than the fact that it came up on my shuffle. I guess that if someone googles "Radio KAOS", that someone might end up here. Which would be cool.

Unread Books meme

2008-05-06T01:47:00.002-04:00

I picked up this meme from Manamania. This is a list of the top 106 books marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Your task, if you pick up the meme, is to bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you only read because you had to for school, and underline the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Note: At least two of those bolded books came from my subscriptions at dailylit.com. It's never too late.

Danny Federici

2008-04-18T23:31:00.002-04:00

I'm sure you've heard by now that Danny Federici of the E Street Band died yesterday from melanoma. I add my condolences along with the rest of his fans to his family and friends.

I'm also sure many people will be pointing out their favorite Federici moments. Here's mine, and it has nothing to do with E Street. Listen to this 1996 track by Mark Lindsay (yes, Raider Mark). Danny's accordion on this song sets the perfect mood.

Mark Lindsay / Rouge on blue (1996)

PS: You can buy the Mark Lindsay CD "Video Dreams", where Danny plays Hammond organ as well as accordion, at marklindsay.com. It's really quite an extraordinary album.

History meme

2008-04-18T18:53:00.002-04:00

[dad@porky ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
95 ls
64 cd
23 vncviewer
19 vim
18 moosic
14 yaourt
14 mv
12 python
12 du
11 cat

The best baseball blog ever

2008-03-19T01:37:00.002-04:00

The best baseball blog, at least for Yankees fans like me, is Peter Abraham's LoHud Yankees Blog. ("LoHud" means Lower Hudson Valley, tourist.) A perfect example of Pete's wit is his latest post: Ten people to avoid at the ballpark. Brilliant. I've met all ten of them.

Obama confronts the 800-pound gorilla

2008-03-19T00:27:00.003-04:00

Barack Obama's speech on March 18 transcends the Presidential election. The issues he addresses, and the candor with which he addresses them, showed me that he cares more about our country and our world than he does about becoming President. Whether he wins or loses, this man is critical to our progress as a species.

Please, invest a half-hour of your life to watching this entire speech. Don't settle for soundbites or distillations from people who think they know what the important bits were or what they really mean. Sit yourself down and just watch the whole damn thing. Afterward, support whoever you want for President. But deal with what Obama says honestly.

This is straight talk, folks.

West Side Story

2008-03-12T01:11:00.002-04:00

I've been given an amazing opportunity. I'm acting in a high school play at the age of 50.

I suppose a bit of explanation is in order. I live in the town of Nutley, New Jersey, and my kids are both in the public schools here. Both are artistically inclined, and have been involved in theatrical productions, bands, choirs, etc. I've also been participating in the local theatre productions -- I love to act, and the "town shows" sponsored by Nutley Parks and Recreation have given me a great outlet for my thespian inclinations. I've had the extraordinary pleasure of acting with each of my children in the town shows.

This year, Mike Cundari, the incredibly talented choirmaster at Nutley High School, decided to mount a production of "West Side Story". An incredibly difficult show to pull off, but the payoff is huge if the production clicks. The upside of a high school production of this show is that almost every part is age-appropriate -- Maria, Tony, Bernardo, Anita, et al are supposed to be high-school age. Even most of the adult parts are arguably young adults -- Krupke, Schrank, Glad Hand. The only genuine "old guy" is Doc. So, the director asked me to play Doc. I jumped at the chance. I've never done "West Side Story", and I absolutely love the show.

Thank God I said "yes". I cannot adequately describe how bloody talented this cast is. Most of these actors are people that I have known since they were small children. They are certainly not now. They are young men and women of enormous ability, who have taken this production to heights that I can scarcely believe. I am proud to be a part of this cast, and humbled by their talent and obvious dedication to the task.

If anyone from the cast happens to read my blog: Thank you. It's been an honor and a pleasure working with you, and we will kick some serious ass on Thursday.

SNL's done something funny

2008-02-25T13:35:00.001-05:00

I can't remember the last time something from Saturday Night Live made me laugh out loud. This one did.

Congratulations, Herbie Hancock

2008-02-12T00:59:00.000-05:00

Herbie Hancock won a surprising Album of the Year Grammy last night, with his marvelous River: The Joni Letters. Herbie has had a wonderful and eclectic career in jazz, from his early work with Miles Davis, through his electric jazz success with Rockit, to the present day. Other Hancock works of note: Watermelon Man, a staple of high school jazz bands everywhere (and rightly so), and his love note to George Gershwin, Gershwin's World.

If you want to get the Album of the Year, here's an Amazon link: River: The Joni Letters (with Bonus Tracks) - Amazon.com Exclusive

Herbie, you're the best.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln

2008-02-12T00:26:00.000-05:00

February 12. Birthday of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most extraordinary politicians in the history of the United States. To see how extraordinary, I heartily recommend Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which documents how Lincoln built his cabinet with the very people who were his rivals for the Presidency. Obama and Clinton take note.

February 12. Birthday of Charles Darwin, the man who put science on the right track. Obviously, he wasn't correct in every detail, but don't let this derail you. His work is rightly venerated for pointing the way to a correct understanding of how we came to be. His birthday is now celebrated as Darwin Day, as explained at darwinday.org.

Yes, we can

2008-02-03T00:54:00.000-05:00

Tired of negative campaign ads? Try a positive one for a change.

The New Jersey primary is this Tuesday. I would probably have voted for Chris Dodd, the hero of FISA, if he were still running. But I think I know which way I'm going now.

Get out and vote.

Awesome organist

2008-01-28T00:45:00.000-05:00

At first, it looks like just another child doing just another recital piece, but it gets awesome quickly. Keep an eye on the bass line being played by her left foot.

Via Erik's Weblog.

Amazing Young Organ Player Rocks Out - Watch more free videos

Making the Electoral College irrelevant

2008-01-05T01:02:00.000-05:00

Before I start, I should mention that using the word "irrelevant" always reminds me of Chico Marx. If you don't know why, you must go watch the greatest comedy of all time (imho).

Now, where were we? Ah, yes, making the Electoral College irrelevant. Obviously, someone had a brilliant idea some time ago, and for some reason, today is the first I'm hearing of it. You can go to nationalpopularvote.org for the full scoop, but here's the gist. The Electoral College method of electing a President is stupid, and Al Gore *should* have been President in 2000 since more people voted for him than for the Boob in Chief. However, to scrap the Electoral College, we need a Constitutional Amendment, which is a pain in the rump. However times two, there's a loophole waiting to be exploited. Each state can decide for itself how the electors it sends to the Electoral College should vote. Currently, they all say, "Whoever got more votes here in My State gets all our Electors". Suppose, instead, the State said, "Whoever got the most votes NATIONALLY gets all our Electors". Hmm.

Okay, the trick here is that if enough states (270 Electors worth, if memory serves) agree to do this, the President will be elected by the popular vote instead of the current idiocy. So far, only Maryland has committed to it, but here in New Jersey, we're awfully close to doing the same. This is a *brilliant* end-run around the Electoral College, and I really hope it works.

Facebook, Scoble and Russell's Law

2008-01-03T20:59:00.000-05:00

The ubiquitous Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook temporarily for screen scraping his friends' email addresses via an alpha test program from Plaxo. Like almost everything Robert does, this incident reverberated around the Internet, with bloggers expounding on whether Facebook or Scoble were "in the right". In particular, here's Jeff Jarvis' take called In Defense of Facebook. You should also read Is There A Conflict Between Open Social Graphs And Your Privacy? by Julian Sanchez at TechDirt.

In my opinion, both Jarvis and Sanchez are making the same basic mistake, although Sanchez attempts to talk his way out of it. The real problem with Facebook's attempt to control the data flow, and Jarvis' and Sanchez' belief that they have a right to control the data flow, is that it breaks Russell's Law. Russell's Law (which I made up, but has been holding up very well so far) states: You cannot encrypt past the intended recipient. It was originally coined to convey the impossibility of enforcing "for-your-eyes-only" emails via cryptography, but it applies to many situations. Like the impossibility of foolproof DRM-protected music. Now, here's another situation where it applies perfectly. You can't stop your Facebook friends from giving your email address to whomever they choose. You can make it temporarily tedious, but that's it.

The Remainders in 1983

2007-12-26T22:15:00.000-05:00

My old band, in it's only video appearance. This was the short-lived lineup that was missing guitarist Jim Moore, but he was represented as a songwriter. Here we see Bill Greenrose and Chris Wilson on guitars, Jerry Russell on drums, and me on bass.

Part 1: "No other man but me", written by me (if you don't count the fact that I stole the basic riff from Ray Charles):

Part 2: "Romance", written by Russell and Moore:

This video was made by Beth Ann Herrick at the Seton Hall University television studio. I haven't heard from Beth Ann in years -- maybe she'll do a vanity Google search and find this here.

George W covers R.E.M.

2007-12-22T00:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, this video is some of the most brilliant editing work I've ever seen. I can only hope that some bonehead who may think they own a fraction of a second of some of the source material doesn't force it offline.

Cleaning keyboards

2007-12-19T00:57:00.000-05:00

Random thought: Shouldn't computer keyboards have an on-off switch to tell the computer that it should ignore incoming input when I have to clean up after a spill?

This should probably be a Twitter post, but to be honest, I haven't quite committed to Twitter yet. This probably indelibly marks me as lagging behind the curve, but what the hell.

Thank you, Senator Dodd!

2007-12-18T00:27:00.000-05:00

Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Chris Dodd did something extraordinary today. He kept his word.

Dodd promised to use every means necessary, including filibuster, to prevent any FISA bill that included retroactive amnesty (for telecom companies that broke the law because the spooks asked nicely) from getting through the Senate. And when push came to shove today, he made sure he was at the Capitol instead of campaigning in Iowa, and started wading through all the procedural steps that Senators can't be bothered with anymore. Finally convinced that Dodd was as good as his word, Senate majority leader Harry Reid delayed the bill until January. A few other Senators were supportive, but this was Dodd's victory.

However, you'd never know it from reading the infotainment that passes for mainstream news these days. Check out CNN or anything else that Google News links to, and see how far down you have to read to see Dodd's name. It's depressing.

Mind you, I'm not a Dodd supporter. There are plenty of issues where Senator Dodd and I could have a knock-down-drag-out discussion. But dammit, the man kept his word, and all I can say is, "Thank you."

PS: Edward Kennedy was one of Dodd's supporters, and the man can still turn a phrase: "The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retro-active immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he's willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies."

Musical innovation: The Thummer

2007-12-10T21:43:00.000-05:00

You may have seen a fascinating new MIDI controller called The Thummer before, but it's getting some more exposure now due to this WSJ article about it. I became aware of the article via a post on Richard Florida's Creative Class Exchange blog, and then I got into a great exchange in the comment thread with Jim Plamondon, the inventor of the Thummer. We touch on the history of musical keyboards, the benefit of standards, how best to encourage innovation, patents, and even music. Richard is quite indulgently letting us use his space for the conversation. Drop by and add your views.

I wish all CEOs were like this...

2007-12-05T00:08:00.000-05:00

Whether you follow the business of tech or not (and from my New York mega-region viewpoint, I follow it only as a bemused observer), you will find the post to which I'm directing you to be incredibly entertaining. Real or fake? We report, you decide.

An Interview with the CEO of SixApart on the occasion of the Sale of LiveJournal.

(Via The Fishbowl. Brilliant.)

Faith in humanity

2007-12-01T00:54:00.000-05:00

Watch the whole clip. You may get a little nervous, like you may be watching a train wreck and don't want to see.

Watch the whole clip.

(Via I'm Just Sayin')

The good sense of hacking lives on

2007-11-30T00:49:00.000-05:00

Back in the days when you could leave your car unlocked in the driveway, and you could leave your Unix shell account unlocked on your server, the term hacker was a noble one. We keep trying to reclaim it from the identity thieves and 1337 skryptkiddi3s, but language is notoriously hard to manage in any purposeful way. Still, we haven't created a suitable new term for the concept, so any references to hacking in this post refer to the good kind.

What hackers do best is use the tools at hand in ways that were never intended by the providers of these tools. Smart providers revel in this. Idiot providers do all they can to prevent it. In the interest of promoting the smart providers, I'd like you to take a look at the latest version of brilliant hacking.

Mobile phones are getting pretty sophisticated. A lot of them now have accelerometers in them -- something that can detect movement. Of course, almost any mobile phone has a vibrator (steady, now), and virtually all of them have a speaker. Add in the fact that these three things can be controlled via software. A good hacker will look at this situation and ponder, "What can we do with these raw materials?" Well, some boffins in Glasgow (there's no better hacker than a Scots hacker) came up with a doozy. (Go ahead, click on doozy. Go read about it. This is how the internets are supposed to work.)

I never would have thought to combine those features in this way, but it's exquisitely hawesome. (Wil Wheaton taught me to spell awesome this way. Honestly, it's not my fault.)

Rocky the Flying Human

2007-11-16T18:29:00.000-05:00

You have to see this video of people who actually fly the same way flying squirrels do. Watch the video here. (Via Doc Searls' Weblog)

Scoble's biggest fan

2007-11-08T16:48:00.000-05:00

I thought this was interesting when it showed up on Facebook today...

Rolling Stone rock quiz

2007-11-05T17:44:00.000-05:00

I got a 47 (Expert). There must be some better use of my memory cells, but there you go. Rolling Stone's Almost-Impossible Rock and Roll Quiz,

Must-read essay: Schneier's "The War on the Unexpected"

2007-11-02T00:38:00.000-04:00

Bruce Schneier lives in an interesting middle ground between cryptography and journalism. This perspective gives his essays on security an uncommon and refreshing bias toward common sense. His latest, "The War on the Unexpected", should be required reading for every employee of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, not to mention every living soul in Boston.

Nothing I could add would help. Just click here and read for yourself.

Disclaimer: Bruce and I worked together briefly around the turn of the century. That fact doesn't make this essay any less brilliant. It's just why I always read his writings.

So the Series is set: Rockies vs Red Sox

2007-10-22T01:34:00.000-04:00

I love October.

The baseball playoffs inevitably produce some of the most entertaining sports of the year. Of course, as an inveterate Yankees fan, I was disappointed by their first-round exit this year, but I never give up on the playoffs just because my team gets eliminated.

It's a given that, as a Yankees fan, I will root for anyone playing against the Red Sox. So I'm crushed yet again as Cleveland was eliminated tonight, but I have to say that watching Manny play the wall as if he were Yaz was entertaining. There's been some great plays in all the elimination rounds, and the Series should be a good one.

My prediction: Rockies in 5. The layoff wasn't long enough to derail the runaway train that Colorado is. At least I hope so.

Update: Obviously, not one of my better predictions. Much as I hate to admit it, Boston deserved the sweep. In the immortal words uttered by baseball fans the world over, "Wait'll next year!"

Things I've learned from bootlegs

2007-10-19T01:08:00.000-04:00

The earlier the Led Zeppelin bootleg, the better. I'm listening to Heartbreaker from the 1970.03.21 Vancouver show at the moment.

R. I. P. Tommy Makem

2007-08-03T00:10:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite musicians died yesterday. Tommy Makem was a familiar name to any fans of Irish music, and also to fans of the 1960s New York folk scene. His work with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem redefined Irish music to the American audience. And you can be sure that if you've ever been in an Irish pub, you've heard someone sing the song "Four Green Fields", which Tommy wrote.

For more details, read his obituary in the New York Times. And then go find one of his records and listen for a while.

Of all the comrades e'er I had, they're sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts e'er I had , they wish me one more day to stay,
But since it falls unto my lot that I should go and you should not,
I'll gently rise and softly call, goodnight and joy be with you all.

Keith Olbermann rocks

2007-07-25T00:23:00.000-04:00

I've seen a few of Olbermann's previous rants, and found them quite refreshing, especially when compared to the pablum that's fed to us by almost all television news outlets. This latest one, however, is required viewing for every American.

Deathly Hallows Eve

2007-07-19T21:58:00.000-04:00

I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released to the public at midnight tomorrow. I will be bringing my 12-year-old daughter one last time to the midnight release party at Barnes and Noble, after which the whole family will be stealing the book back and forth as we try to all read it at the same time. And, yes, we all have color-coded bookmarks.

I'm also sure I don't have to tell anyone that the book is already available for illicit downloading, but apparently some brain-dead lawyers working for Scholastic Books think it is illegal to tell you that. Luckily, this blog, unlike TechCrunch, has such a miniscule audience that I am unlikely to attract a takedown notice. However, I do promise to post it if I get one.

In the meantime, the bonehead who posted the book did so by using his digital camera to photograph each page. For those of you who don't know, digital cameras embed information like the date and time the photograph was taken within the JPEG file that we all treat as the photo itself. The bonehead in question left all this information in the JPEG files that made up his Potter giveaway, even though one of the embedded data items is the serial number of the camera, and this may lead police right to said bonehead's door. (Via Boing Boing.)

Now, I probably wouldn't have posted any of this had I not followed Boing Boing's link to the TimesOnline story. Reading the story just made me want to rant: Journalism for Dummies at its finest, right from the headline that calls the metadata embedded in the JPEG files Digital DNA. But the most striking bit of misinformation was this:

"The Exif data is like the picture's DNA; you can't switch it off. Every image has it. Some software can be used to strip or edit the information, but you can't edit every field," Mr Solomon said.

I know we started with Harry Potter, but what are these, magic JPEG files? You can't edit every field? What if I convert it to a Windows BMP and then back to a JPEG, do the magic fields apparate into the new file? Is there a special enchantment that resists hex editors? I would suggest to Mr. Solomon, who is billed as a "product intelligence officer" from Canon UK (ye gods, even the job title makes me laugh), that he amend his comment to "you can't edit every field with the crapware we give you on the CD that comes with the camera".

Okay, end rant. I have to go plan my hiding spots for the book, and hope mine are better than my wife's and children's.

Accio wristband! (I hope that works at Barnes and Noble tomorrow.)

Producing music again

2007-07-16T21:55:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I last produced any music in my basement studio. It usually takes some kind of catalyst to place me in the correct mindset. This time, it was twin catalysts.

The first was hearing from an old friend on classmates.com. Well, more than an old friend, truth be told. It was my high-school sweetheart. We had lost touch over the years, and it was wonderful catching up with her. I mentioned this to my old band mates, two of whom knew her and two of whom did not. I could quickly describe her to the other two by saying, "She's the one Times gone by is about." This was one of the first songs I wrote, and certainly the first one that didn't suck. Our band, the Remainders (who had the name long before Dave Barry) played Times gone by quite a bit. However, our one early attempt at recording the song never quite captured what I wanted.

The second catalyst was a disk crash. I take a long time to migrate from one Linux box to the next, and still had all my audio recording and mixing software on 'berkelium', a 600 MHz Dell Dimension that was a leftover from Lockstar, the dot-bomb I worked for around the turn of the millennium. Its disk crash finally forced me to finish my move to 'porky', a 2.6 GHz HP/Compaq that I picked up on eBay for a song. Playing around with ecasound, my favorite audio software, I discovered that jumping from 600 MHz to 2.6 GHz makes a big difference in what you can do.

So, Times gone by got re-recorded. I used Hydrogen for the basic drum track, but recorded everything else live. Ecasound is great for multitrack recording as well as mixing, and the fact that it supports LADSPA plugins allowed me to give the lead guitar a nice fake-Marshall sound.

Anyway, I put the track up on the Open Source Audio collection at archive.org, and you can listen to it or download it here.

The upcoming temporal anomaly

2007-05-05T01:10:00.000-04:00

I was perusing James Randi's newsletter tonight, and saw his mention (via his friend Scot Morris) that we have one of those calendar-clock oddities coming up early this Sunday morning. A few minutes after 2 in the morning, it will be 02:03:04 05/06/07.

Well, I thought this was cool, and decided to share it with my 16-year-old son when he came in from hanging out with his friends. When I informed him of the interesting tidbit, he nodded appreciatively for about 2 seconds, and then said, "It will be much better just after 8 o'clock."

This stopped me cold. "Why?"

"Well, then it will be 05/06/07 08:09:10.111213... and you can go on as long as you want."

Mind you, this kid hates math. And this occurred to him immediately. As Jimmy Durante used to say, I'm stupified.

A large number

2007-05-03T00:11:00.000-04:00

Thirteen undecillion, two hundred fifty-six decillion, two hundred seventy-eight nonillion, eight hundred eighty-seven octillion, nine hundred eighty-nine septillion, four hundred fifty-seven sextillion, six hundred fifty-one quintillion, eighteen quadrillion, eight hundred sixty-five trillion, nine hundred one billion, four hundred one million, seven hundred four thousand, six hundred forty.

Just another number. Pretty far up the ol' x-axis, but still an ordinary (and ordinal) integer.

Just don't express it in base 16.

Roger Ebert is my hero

2007-04-26T00:53:00.000-04:00

For those of you who are unaware of what's going on in Roger Ebert's life, he is currently recovering from surgery to save him from cancer of the salivary gland that moved on to his jaw. There have been some complications that certainly don't affect his mind or his wit, but make him, well, unattractive. As Roger says in this great article he wrote after his surgery, "So let’s talk turkey. What will I look like? To paraphrase a line from 'Raging Bull,' I ain’t a pretty boy no more."

Go read the article. What it addresses is the fact that Roger has been advised not to attend his own Overlooked Film Festival due to what people might say about how he looks now. His answer boils down to, "Screw them. I'm going." He says this much more eloquently, and makes some excellent points in the article. Like I said, go read it.

I've always liked Ebert. I like him even more now.

Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions Podcast - 92Y Blog - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY

2007-04-13T16:09:00.000-04:00

To paraphrase from Deadeye Dick:

He had curly golden hair, and he had lost almost none of it when his peephole closed, when he was allowed to stop being Kurt Vonnegut, when he became just another wisp of undifferentiated nothingness again.

Listen: The 92nd Street Y has posted a wonderful podcast, featuring Vonnegut reading from the then-unpublished Breakfast of Champions on May 4, 1970. (So he must have been reading this at about the same time National Guardsmen were shooting at Kent State students. So it goes.)

Go Kodak!

2007-04-11T01:45:00.000-04:00

This is the funniest commercial I've seen in twenty years. I'm telling you, this is the future of advertising.

Today I ripped: The Tremblers / Twice Nightly

2007-04-06T01:49:00.000-04:00

To be precise, I pulled this one out of the stack of LP's a few weeks ago and ripped it, but finally finished the splitting and encoding tonight, so the post title isn't entirely inaccurate.

To the untrained eye, this is a typical album for the date-of-release (1980) -- decent power pop in the Nick Lowe vein. However, the lead singer might stir some earlier memories. The guy in the red shirt and pants on that cover is Peter Noone, famed in song and story as the lead singer of Herman's Hermits, the British Invasion version of Rodney Dangerfield, in that they get no respect. Justified to some extent, since the Hermits were quite callously manipulated by manager Mickey Most to maximize profits, but a close listen to any Hermits album reveals some nice rocking.

By 1980, Peter was a has-been at a far earlier age than anyone should be. Becoming a household name at 16 does that to you, I suppose. (16!?! My son is 16. Arrgh!) The Tremblers may have been his attempt for some credibility, but it sank without a trace as far as I know. Listening to it now, it's a shame that it did. Most songs are at least co-credited to Noone, and the band does a decent job with most. Peter still had a too-sweet voice for outright rocking, but it's not bad at all. And the band has to earn some points for the album's one cover song, Elvis Costello's Green Shirt.

I've always liked Noone, and the Hermits as well. I was exposed to them early on -- my older sister was a big fan, pasting pages from 16 Magazine on her wall, and playing 45's of A Must to Avoid and Dandy until we ALL knew the lyrics. That's probably why I bought this album when it came out. But it did get quite a few spins on the turntable on its own merits, and I'm glad it's digitized and part of my shuffle now.

In a bit of synchronicity, I had already started digitizing this album when I sat down to watch American Idol with my daughter the week that Peter Noone was a guest. It did make me feel a bit old when Liza Persky at Idol Critic had no idea who he was.

The impossibility of DRM: Russell's Law

2007-02-18T22:15:00.000-05:00

"I ca'n't believe that!" said Alice.
"Ca'n't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said "one ca'n't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Back in the days of Bubble 1.0, I was a full-time cryptographic engineer. This meant that I had to know enough about cryptographic protocols to implement them in software without breaking them. This is not as easy as it sounds, which is why virtually all software packages have periodic security update patches. The companies I worked for at that time were typical Bubble 1.0 companies, which meant that they were trying to come up with the next "killer app", something that would cost us nothing to make and for which everyone would pay us gobs of money. So part of my job became explaining to various people why cryptographic protocols could not solve one problem or another. The most common recurring theme in these ideas for money-making crypto apps was copy protection -- preventing people from making digital copies of digital data.

I explained my reasons for thinking this to be an impossible task so many times that I had it boiled down to a single sentence: You cannot encrypt past the intended recipient. I even began to egotistically refer to it as Russell's Law. Originally, it referred to encrypted email, when someone suggested trying to enforce a "For Your Eyes Only" prohibition. This cannot be done with cryptography. If you can't trust the person who is supposed to be able to read your message, you're hosed. It seemed as obvious to me as the old saying: If an attacker has physical access to your computer, it's already compromised. (If anyone knows who first said this one, let me know.)

Fast forward to 2007, and the current debate about the merits of DRM (Digital Rights Management). (If you don't know what DRM is, you can read Wired's How to Explain DRM to Your Dad.) What's the point of DRM? It intends to prevent people from doing prohibited things with digital data after they have received it. It tries to do this via various cryptographic protocols. In other words, it's a violation of Russell's Law. It's trying to achieve the impossible.

Want proof? DVDs had an encryption method built into them, as an attempt to control in what part of the world each DVD could be viewed. That was defeated, by the intended recipients. The lesson learned from this by the Big Media Producers was that they needed bigger, better, stronger encryption for the next new standards, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD hi-resolution video discs. Guess what? Not long after release, those protocols were broken, too! Russell's Law is still just as valid as ever.

Much has been made of Steve Jobs' blogging where he makes a good case for abandonment of DRM, but it troubles me that he still talks as if DRM is something that can successfully be implemented. Much more interesting is the response from Macrovision, a DRM vendor. If you want to know why I quoted Lewis Carroll at the top, read this and imagine the Queen speaking to Alice. Better yet, read Daring Fireball's translation of Macrovision's response.

But the beat goes on -- Bill Gates probably understands the validity of Russell's Law, but Microsoft is still creating new DRM schemes. I'm sure this one, like all the others, will make money being sold to companies who believe six impossible things before breakfast. I'm also sure that it will be defeated, and quickly.

Today I ripped: Gordon Jenkins / Manhattan Tower

2007-02-15T20:18:00.000-05:00

My first encounter with Gordon Jenkins was as a teenaged Harry Nilsson fan back in the '70s. Harry did something unheard of at the time, recording an album full of old standards like As Time Goes By and Makin' Whoopee, backed by a full orchestra. (Obviously, it's not unheard of now, but I don't think it's fair to blame Harry for Rod Stewart's indulgences.) The orchestra was conducted by Gordon Jenkins, who I later found out had an incredible career, working with Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, and many others. He also collaborated with the Weavers, most famously on Leadbelly's Goodnight, Irene.

Suffice it to say that over the years I have become suitably impressed by Gordon Jenkins. So, when I spotted an LP credited to him at a garage sale, I snapped it up. The album, pictured here, is Manhattan Tower and California: Two Musical Narratives (Decca DLP 8011). When I got around to listening to it as part of my vinyl digitization project, I found that the "musical narrative" form is something that reminds me a great deal of early Disney work -- musical motifs under a storyline narration, occasionally breaking into small choral or solo songs.

About halfway through the first narrative, though, I heard something very familiar -- the song New York's My Home, one I have always known through Ray Charles' rendition. Initially, I thought Jenkins must have incorporated it into the narrative. A bit of research (all right, Googling) leads me to believe, instead, that Manhattan Tower is, in fact, the original source of this song. The album itself is dated 1949, and the hit version of the song, by Sammy Davis, Jr., did not come out until the 1950s. And the credited author of the song, on both Davis' and Charles' versions, is Gordon Jenkins. So, finding the original version of it was a nice treat.

One side note: barring the discovery of some other forgotten, buried treasure, this album represents the oldest LP I own. As I mentioned, the copyright on this album is 1949, and according to Wikipedia, the LP was first introduced in 1948.

New blogging topic: Digitizing vinyl

2007-02-06T00:13:00.000-05:00

I've been looking for something interesting to write about, as I while away my time digitizing my extensive collection of vinyl recordings (a. k. a. "records"). The small voice inside my head, which sounds astonishingly like the small voice inside Wil Wheaton's head, sez, "Duh! Blog about what you're doing!". True that. The Vinyl Digitization Obsession (VDO) process itself is fascinating, and quite blog-worthy.

I'll get into technical details later -- details most of you will probably hate, since I still find Linux, command-line utilities, and shell scripts to be my best friends when it comes to getting anything done on a computer. For the initial post on the topic, I'd like to ruminate on the pleasures I've discovered in the activity.

Ripping a CD is not really enjoyable, but it is fast. I thought at first that "ripping" my albums would be tedious, since it has to occur in real-time. But that has become its charm. I have been listening to albums that I haven't touched in ages. Reacquainting myself with music that defined me as a young man. (Those ones are kinda scratchy.) Discovering albums that I bought at the end of the vinyl bell-curve that never got played at all due to the overlapping start of the compact disc bell-curve.

As I slog through them, I've found quite a few that deserve wider recognition. That's where the blogworthiness comes in. (I'm not sure I spelled blogworthiness correctly, even though I'm reasonably certain I made the word up.) As certain LPs catch my ear, I'll note them in the blog.

As we speak, I'm digitizing John Lennon's Mind Games. I don't ever recall noticing before that the song Out the blue is such a blatant rewrite of Sexy Sadie. I guess John was lucky he didn't have the same music publisher that John Fogerty did.

I'm Spider-Man

2006-12-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man		90%
Superman		75%
Supergirl		63%
Robin		60%
The Flash		60%
Catwoman		55%
Iron Man		55%
Hulk		55%
Green Lantern		50%
Wonder Woman		43%
Batman		40%

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

Lebanon from the inside

2006-11-24T00:29:00.000-05:00

There's no better way to keep up with what's going on in Lebanon than by following the Manamania blog. The mainstream news will never tell the story of the Lebanese people as well as one of their own, especially one who writes as well as Mana does.

Her latest post is a wonderful picture essay of the solidarity demonstration engendered by Gemayel's assassination and funeral.

A Google bomb for a good cause

2006-11-20T23:16:00.000-05:00

See this post to see what this is all about. I know having Scoble do it helps a lot more than my two-hits-per-day blog (thanks, Dad!), but it couldn't hurt.

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Endy Chavez!

2006-10-19T22:59:00.000-04:00

Mets and Cards are tied 1-1 in the bottom of the eighth at this point. LaRussa just took Suppan out of the game after pitching a hell of a game. I gotta say, though, that whoever wins, the most amazing moment of any of the playoff games this year was Endy Chavez's catch of what should have been a home run by Scott Rolen. You'll see the clips over and over tomorrow. Wow.

Metablogging while watching baseball

2006-10-17T22:33:00.000-04:00

This is the end, I hope, of another extended absence from the bjimblog.

It occurred to me while reading Dave Winer's posts on Scripting News that the reason I have these months-long gaps in the blog is that I try to make each post an major event. Dave doesn't do that. He's posting while watching the same Mets/Cards game that I'm watching. (Duncan just hit a home run -- Cards 4, Mets 2). I was treating posts too much like work.

Part of that was trying to add all those tags. I write directly in HTML, but don't want to have to remember the syntax for Technorati tags. I see that the new Blogger beta has a Labels for this post box below, so I'll start using that, and see what that does.

Concert review: Ringo @ PNC, Holmdel NJ

2006-07-19T20:39:00.000-04:00

I have a mental checklist of musicians I would like to see in concert at least once in my life. Last night, I got to check one off the list, as I went to see Ringo Starr and his latest version of the All-Starr Band.

The whole idea of the All-Starr Band is brilliant. Much as I love Richard Starkey, MBE, I have to admit that it would be tough for him to carry a full-length concert on his own. He has always functioned best as just one Starr in a constellation. So, when he finally decided back in 1989 to give touring a go for the first time since the 1966 Beatles, he assembled a group of well-known friends like Clarence Clemons, Dr. John, and Billy Preston to join the band. He must have enjoyed the experience, since he's undertaken a new All-Starr Band tour every two years or so, inviting a new group each time. This year marks the ninth tour.

The All-Starr Band concert format is simple. Ringo starts out up front with a microphone, singing a couple of instantly recognizable hits. There is always a second drummer on the tour to keep Ringo free to play or not as the moment demands. After a bit, he retreats to his drumkit, and allows each of the All-Starrs to take a turn in the spotlight. Unlike most "host of special guests" concerts, however, everyone stays on stage and plays everyone else's songs. The resulting chemistry among the unlikely pairings is what gives these concerts their undeniable appeal.

This year's model features: 1980s MTV icons Billy Squier and Richard Marx as the guitarists, with Billy taking most of the leads; a somewhat older pair of icons, Edgar Winter and Rod Argent, on keyboards; third-time All-Starr Sheila E on drums, and the ever-reliable Hamish Stuart from the Average White Band on bass. That's it, brother -- no back-up band, extra synth players, taped backing, nothing. Every player in this band has had a Top 40 single at some point. And the thing that really struck me about this show is how much these folks enjoyed playing with each other. Billy Squier playing the lead on Marx's "Should've known better", Ringo and Sheila giving Rod a rock-solid foundation for his lead organ on "Hold your head up", and the whole band's incredible interpretation of Edgar's instrumental "Frankenstein" (the fact that a ferocious lightning storm blew through during the song didn't hurt the atmosphere) -- the pleasure that the band took in each others' talents could not help but please the audience as well. Of course, having Ringo as the Grand Old Man, reveling in the accomplishments of the rest, is the perfect touch. Still the same wise-cracking, ad-libbing Liverpudlian that he's always been -- during the storm, he asked if anyone in the band knew the chords to "Rain" -- he knows that the audience now looks to him as old Uncle Ringo, a living connection to All Those Years Ago, and he comfortably plays along.

As Ringo remarked before the band broke into "Yellow Submarine", "If you don't know the words to this one, you don't know why you're here." Well, we all knew, and we all sang, and a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

Tags: ringo, ringostarr, beatles, concert, review, music

Since last we met: revive the laptop, copy the floppy

2006-03-25T00:50:00.000-05:00

I'm not dead.

The preceding is the obligatory opening for a blog post after a week or two of serene quiet on a personal blog like this one. It soothes the dozen or so folks that actually notice. Bloggers use this opening all the time; the most recent one I recall was the one here at Bibi's Box. The fact that it's a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an added bonus.

I've been spending my time on restoring a Compaq Presario 1800T laptop to working condition, thanks to a fortuitous purchase of a box of parts on eBay. The project was a success, and I'm using it now for this post. Nothing fancy, just a bit of cleanup, and replacement of the keyboard and hard drive. I switched my "brand" of Linux for this machine, but I want to devote a full post to that.

The other thing that's been keeping me away from blogging is a major purging of clutter from my cellar. I'm a devoted preserver, a term which sounds much better than "packrat". Eventually, though, one simply runs out of room, and some treasures must go. Part of this mission is to finally get rid of any remaining floppy disks, but of course not before saving the contents to DVD-R. I hooked up a 5.25 inch drive for what I hope will be the final time, and spent a lot of time at the command prompt, typing fdflush; dd if=/dev/fd0 of=img bs=1k and then renaming the image. For you Linux-come-lately folks, the fdflush command was required for most old floppy drives back when floppies really were floppy (think David Letterman waggling one at his desk). The OS had no idea that you changed disks, and if you didn't tell it, it would happily present you with data from a disk that was no longer in the drive because it had cached the whole thing in memory. Hilarity, of course, ensued.

The one important thing I learned from that adventure is that only about 75 per cent of 5.25 inch floppies survive readably after being in a cardboard box in the cellar for fifteen years or so. I hope I fare better with the cassette tapes. (Audio from old concerts -- I don't think I'll even try to preserve the VIC-20 data tapes.)

Tags: montypython, presario, clutter, floppy, fdflush

My first handheld computer game

2006-03-06T22:32:00.000-05:00

The current crop of handhelds, like my GP2X, are great. However, it's fun to look back at what we used to have. Donald Melanson, over at Engadget, did a nice look back in his A Brief History of Handheld Video Games. That post seems to be causing waves of nostalgia among the blogs, like this from Wil Wheaton.

Well, I can go them one better, I think. The handheld pictured here, which I believe predates the Mattel one on Engadget, is "Space Invader" (leave off the last "S" for safe-from-a-lawsuit!) from Entex Electronics of Japan. It's hard to tell from the photo, but this thing still works after almost thirty years! See if that PSP still boots up in 2035...

Now plaing on Moosic server:
London Symphony Orchestra / Zappa: Mo 'n Herb's vacation (3rd movement)

Tags: gaming, handheld, spaceinvaders, retro

Good crypto from Microsoft! In other news, it's snowing in Hades...

2006-03-05T16:00:00.000-05:00

Suddenly, I'm feeling much better about Microsoft.

One of the features in the upcoming Windows Vista operating system is a drive encryption package called BitLocker. Click here for preliminary documentation. Now, I've had quite a bit of experience with Microsoft security features and failures in the past, and didn't really investigate the new system, especially since virtually all of my home systems are now Linux-based except for one trusty old Windows 2000 box I use to drive my Lexmark printer.

It didn't help matters when this BBC report was published, strongly hinting that Microsoft was in cahoots with the British government to make sure that law enforcement agencies could bypass BitLocker via a back door. My crypto experience tells me that when there's a back door, people other than those intended will find it.

My opinion changed sharply when I discovered that Niels Ferguson was working for Microsoft. Perhaps you don't know this name, but security people do. Niels is a brilliant cryptographer whom I worked with briefly during his association with Bruce Schneier's Counterpane. Niels, among other things, was one of the designers of the Twofish block cipher. I am as certain as I can be that any project with which Niels is associated will not have a back door. (That's Niels in the photo. I doubt if he even remembers me, from the technically good but sales-poor LockStar.)

And, as expected, Niels has said so himself on the MSDN blog for the project. A quote: "Back doors are simply not acceptable. Besides, they wouldn't find anybody on this team willing to implement and test the back door."

Maybe the early buzz is right, after all. Maybe Windows Vista won't suck.

Tags: microsoft, windows, vista, cryptography, bitlocker, nielsferguson

Bill Cosby: Say it ain't so, Cos!

2006-03-05T00:30:00.000-05:00

Andy Baio is a rarity -- a blogger willing to take a stand on principle, and stand up to a celebrity with too much money to pay lawyers. The celebrity in question is Bill Cosby, someone I have long enjoyed and respected. I can only hope, with diminishing expectation, that Cosby is unaware of the cease-and-desist orders being promulgated by his legal team.

Here's the story. It seems that it's okay to parody Mr. Cosby if you've got the money to staff your own legal team, but independents like us can't afford the rights we thought we were guaranteed in the Constitution.

In case Mr. Cosby's legal team sees this post in their scans, I only ask that they pass along the following to Bill himself: Sheldon Leonard would be ashamed of you.

Tags: billcosby, cosby, eff, constitution

Paul McCartney on PBS without a pledge drive!

2006-02-27T23:55:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching Paul McCartney's latest episode of Great Performances on PBS (Chaos and Creation in Abbey Road). Is it my imagination, or does he do a new show for them every two weeks or so? And yet, I still tune in. Every time. Maybe it's my demographic. I watched him play that Hofner bass on a black and white TV in my pajamas when I was six, and never stopped. And you know, McCartney's like pizza. When he's good, he's really good, and when he's bad, he's still pretty good.

My biggest annoyance this time was that he dropped the Lennon-written half of "I've got a feeling", one of the last of the Lennon/McCartney songs that was actually written by both of them. Plus, every time you see Macca with a Mellotron, you know he's going to play the first few bars of "Strawberry Fields forever", and then stop.

However, I thought it was fantastic that he brought Bill Black's old upright bass onstage and played "Heartbreak hotel" on it.

Required geek check for this post: I watched the show in one window of my tiled workspace on the Ion window manager, using AvView on my ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500. While catching up on BlogLines in another window.

Tags: mccartney, beatles, pbs

Google Pages: Works for me

2006-02-24T23:32:00.000-05:00

You may have heard by now about Google Pages, the new free website offering from the same folks who give me this blogspace. The early reviews (Jeff Jarvis', for example) are dismissive, saying that this is just Geocities redux. Nik Cubrilovic, the guest blogger on TechCrunch, gives a good overview, but breezes by the most important point for me in his writeup.

Google Pages does let you upload any file though, and gives you 100MB of space, which some may find more useful for sharing files or distributing SNL video's.

(By the way, Nik, you don't need an apostrophe there. Videos is quite adequate as a plural.)

As they did with Gmail, Google raised the bar on disk space. Geocities gave me 10 meg when I signed up, what, ten years ago? Before the Yahoo buyout, anyway. If you sign up for Geocities today, guess how much you get? 15 meg. Google's giving me 100 meg. Guess who I use?

I know there's plenty of other online diskspace concerns, but I needed something really simple. I'm releasing a lot of files for the GP2X now, and Google Pages makes creating a download repository dead simple. In about five minutes, I had it done. It was probably the first online page editor in which I didn't immediately jump into raw HTML mode. (I'm in raw HTML mode in Blogger right now.)

Here's the result. Just what I wanted.

Tags: google, googlepages, geocities

DosBox for the GP2X

2006-02-17T14:46:00.000-05:00

Most work in the open-source world is done by developers scratching their own itches. This is another example of that.

As my prior blog posts attest, my current favorite toy is the GP2X handheld. One of the things I want to do with it is to play an old DOS game that I loved seventeen years ago (yikes!), BlockOut. This was a fantastic 3-D variant on the Tetris theme.

I looked into various options: porting one of its clones, running it under the already-ported Bochs emulator, rewriting from scratch... I finally had some success by porting DosBox to the GP2X platform. It's similar to Bochs in that it is a software emulation of the Intel CPU, but it also directly provides the DOS infrastructure, and is designed primarily for DOS games.

Well, it works well enough for me to play BlockOut, so I'm making what I've done so far available for download here. It's definitely for people who like to fiddle, since you really have to rewrite obscure text configuration files for every game you want to play, and you have to creatively map the GP2X buttons to enough keys to make the game playable.

If you've got an old DOS game working on the GP2X using this, please let me know!

~~PS: The source for the GP2X kernel is still missing in action, although a new version of the binary has been released today. My self-imposed grace period may be expiring soon.~~ UPDATE: It looks like there was a source release today to coincide with the updated kernel. I'm checking it out of the Subversion repository right now to see what we've got.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, gpl, blockout, dos, dosbox

Joining the brrreeeporterati

2006-02-13T23:51:00.000-05:00

This post really doesn't mean much of anything, except for its multiple references to the word brrreeeport. It's an experiment on blog tagging and indexing, initiated by Robert Scoble in this post. I figured I'd play along.

Tags: brrreeeport

Zmodem for GP2X

2006-02-08T15:51:00.000-05:00

I've deliberately been keeping quiet about the still-unresolved situation with the GP2X handheld's failure to release their modified source code for the Linux kernel. Call it a grace period.

In the meantime, I've been experimenting with coding for the machine. It's an interesting experience, using cross-compilers to generate programs and communicating with the GP2X over a serial interface. Well, actually, I'm tunneling a serial interface through the USB port, as described here at mindstab.net. The problem with this is that you can't have the USB mass storage interface, where you mount the GP2X as if it were a removable drive, running at the same time as the USB gadget interface that lets you log into the system. So, when developing, I either waste a great deal of time switching USB interfaces, or alternately waste a great deal of time sneakernetting my SD card from the GP2X to my desktop card reader.

The solution? Well, the real solution would be to recompile the kernel to get TCP/IP and PPP working over the serial connection, but I don't have the kernel source. (Oops, grace period, remember?) So, it's time to fall back to the days of the BBS and use good old Zmodem to transfer files while connected via my terminal emulator. To that end, I've ported lrzsz, a GPL fork of Zmodem, to the GP2X. Works very nicely for me.

If you're a GP2X developer in a similar situation, you can download the binary here. The tarball also includes a README on building from source yourself, and a tiny patch to make ./configure work.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, gpl, zmodem

A really good day

2006-02-06T15:40:00.000-05:00

This past week has been Tech Week for the production of Oliver! in which I was performing, which left no time at all for the blog. The photograph is of me as Fagin, surrounded by my little thieves and pickpockets. I love doing shows with young actors, and I think you can see my enjoyment here.

Yesterday was one of those days where all the news was good. It was the closing performance of Oliver!, which turned out to be the best show of the run. In addition, my team won the Super Bowl (I've been a Steelers fan since before their first Super Bowl win in 1975), and Seton Hall, my alma mater, beat Rutgers in basketball. To top it all off, I finally got gdb to cross-compile for the GP2X.

I am now dreading the inevitable bad day that I expect will soon arrive to bring balance to the Force.

A hollow Texas drawl says "Plugh"

2006-01-19T12:25:00.000-05:00

I predict that every tech blog written by someone over the age of 30 will have a link to defective yeti: Xyzzy within the next few days. Depending on how much older than 30, you may see references to Zork, Adventure or Colossal Cave as this wonderful political satire is discussed.

Speaking of which, the image for this post is a promotional brochure from 1981, for one of Microsoft's first products for the IBM-PC. Nowhere in the brochure does it mention that they copied this program almost verbatim from the original minicomputer game Colossal Cave.

Tags: microsoft, xyzzy, colossalcave, politics, satire

Now burning feeds

2006-01-16T23:49:00.000-05:00

I've just added a FeedBurner subscription feed to the site, so if you're one of the handful of folks who actually used my Atom feed (Hi, son!), you might have better luck with the new feed.

Of course, the switch was spurred by the fact that BlogLines couldn't read the original feed, so the only people who won't see this message are the feed subscribers. Maybe I'll just call them on the phone one by one. My subscriber list is like the fan base of the hero of "Mr. Richland's Favorite Song". (This reference will be totally lost on you unless you have already taken my advice and gotten the Nilsson anthology.)

Oh, and the switch also caused me to edit the link over on the left side of the web page, so some of what I said in the post about icons isn't quite true anymore. Oh, using .ICO files in an IMG tag still works, I just don't do it now.

Tags: feedburner, nilsson

Remembering Harry

2006-01-16T16:10:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a short break from Linux-geek postings today.

What's on my mind right now is that it was twelve years ago today that Harry Nilsson died. Harry was an extraordinary singer and songwriter, and I'm spending most of the day listening to his records.

If you're not familiar with Harry, or know him only from "Without you" or "Everybody's talkin'", you owe it to yourself to take a closer listen. I recommend Personal Best: The Harry Nilsson Anthology as a good introduction to a wildly eclectic artist.

Tags: music, nilsson

My first Slashdotting

2006-01-12T21:14:00.000-05:00

They say you always remember your first time.

Slashdot posted a link to my previous post, GP2X needs a GPL lesson. This, of course, unleashed the beast known as The Slashdot Effect, which has been known to bring many a web server to its knees. I must say, though, that Blogger held up wonderfully. I know a lot of people knock this place, but I've got no complaints. My biggest problem during the peak was that I have the Bjimblog configured for moderated comments, which means I have to manually approve each comment for publication. This is unfortunately necessary to avoid comment-spam, but I published everything I got that even remotely approached the topic.

Mind you, I purposely brought the Slashdot Effect upon myself. I was the one who submitted the topic to Slashdot. The intended purpose of this was to raise awareness among people who don't own a GP2X that those of us who do are in need of some assistance getting the source code. I think that in those terms, the post was a success. The slew of comments, both here and on Slashdot, were also quite useful. If you get enough geeks shooting off their mouths, someone will say the right thing. (I believe this is a corollary of Linus' Law.)

So, I've got some leads on where to take this next. Thanks to everyone who participated in the free-for-all.

Oh, and I'll say this one more time, in case anyone missed it. I know about the early December source code release. It is an early pre-release version. I mentioned it in the initial post. But it's not the droid we're looking for. The code we're looking for is something that can be compiled to create the released binary. We don't have that yet.

Update: There are quite a few posts suggesting that the situation is close to being resolved by some good folks taking a more diplomatic approach than mine. I appreciate their efforts and hope they are successful. The site to watch now is http://source.gp2x.de/, with expectations for a code release some time this week.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, slashdot, gpl

GP2X needs a GPL lesson

2006-01-10T01:37:00.000-05:00

I mentioned some time back that I was going to get myself a GP2X for Christmas. And so I did. Well, actually, under the Rules of Christmas at our house, my wife officially "got" it for me, just like I "got" her present for her. After seventeen years of marriage, shortcuts are allowed.

First impressions: I love this little unit. Runs a Linux 2.4 kernel, plays movies with mplayer, already has MAME ported to it... Really, it has everything in a handheld game/media machine that a hacker-in-the-old-meaning could want. Except for one thing. The kernel source code.

How could this be? This is Linux we're talking about! The open source poster child! (It most likely is GNU/Linux at that. I haven't poked around enough to see what other components surround the kernel. At the very least, bash is present.)

Well, it seems that the company that created the GP2X, Gamepark Holdings, is a couple of guys in some office space in Seoul. Perhaps some of you who follow the popular blogs remember Cory Doctorow's posts on BoingBoing.net when the GP2X was announced. He noticed the dreaded acronym DRM on their website, and raised alarms. Later, it was explained by the only person at Gamepark Holdings who speaks English that they didn't really understand what they were saying.

Apparently, they don't seem to understand the GPL, either. They (and their subcontractor Dignsys, who actually did the Linux port for the GP2X) have been approached repeatedly for release of their modified version of the Linux kernel. Reluctantly, they finally did so, releasing an early, out-of-date prerelease version of the source, which is useless to the developer community who would like to hunt down some of the current bugs. There are active discussions on the GP2X developer boards on the topic, as people try to find the best way to get Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to comply with the GPL by releasing source concurrently with each new release of the GP2X kernel. Of course, as these sorts of threads tend to do, accusations have flown about all parties involved, most of it totally speculative.

So, herein lies the problem. This handful of early adopters, mostly in Europe and the Americas, is searching for a way to convince Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to do what the GPL requires of them, without taking down the companies. This is a niche product, and they could complain until the cows come home and never get timely releases of the source. Someone with a bit of PR clout must be brought into the picture. But who? Linus? RMS? Cory? Larry? CmdrTaco?

After puzzling for a while (and yes, my puzzler was sore afterwards), I figured it was time to test the blogosphere. I decided to write a post about the situation as I saw it. This post. Now, I'll submit it to the tastemakers and see if anyone is interested.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, gpl

No one wants crippled CDs

2006-01-09T14:31:00.000-05:00

Back in this post, I made a pledge not to buy any more Sony CDs because of their apparent hatred of their own customers. Well, the meme is spreading, and a lot more people are making the decision that crippled CDs are not worth buying.

In fact, there's a pledge drive going on now at PledgeBank. I've signed it. It's not really a petition, just a statement of fact. I won't buy crippled CDs. Apparently, neither will a few thousand other people.

There are plenty of other ways I can legally buy music. Like Magnatune, which is a much better deal for the musicians than they will ever get with a major label.

Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, boycott

Icons, feedicons, and favicons

2005-12-31T00:38:00.000-05:00

A long time ago, when I first started dabbling with Windows programming (Windows version 2, for the new 286 machines!), I first learned about the .ICO file. These files provided the icons that represented your programs. Of course, the interesting thing about the file format was that it wasn't a single graphic, like a .GIF or .BMP file, but a container for one or more graphics.

Fast-forward to today. Every time you visit a website, using a reasonably modern browser like IE6 or Firefox, a little 16x16-pixel icon shows up next to the URL for the site, and that same icon often ends up in other places, like your bookmarks. This is generally known as a favicon, because it was originally introduced by Microsoft around the same time they decided that bookmarks should really be called favorites, much to the dismay of spelling teachers in the UK. Anyway, it turns out that the file needed on a website to make this particular magic happen is, as my foreshadowing may have indicated, a .ICO file.

Now, as the web progresses and morphs, one of the most important concepts to come along is that of the feed. Rather than surf to a bunch of different news sites, blogs, and ~~boobie galleries~~ web comics to see if there's anything new to peruse, sites provide feeds — basically, a place on the website that a computer program can look to see what's new. Then, such a program, called an aggregator, can provide a central place to see today's web at a glance. Aggregators can be installed programs or web-based. I use a web-based one called Bloglines.

You may think I'm rambling a bit, but the topic is still icons. You see, the Firefox browser understood that feeds were important, and provided a special icon to show whether a web site had a feed available. By default, when clicked, it would create something called a "Live Bookmark", but you can install a Firefox extension (and I have) which will add the feed to Bloglines for me when I click. This icon is known as a feedicon. Now, Microsoft has a new version of IE coming down the pike, and they've gotten the feed religion as well. In an unprecedented show of good sense, Microsoft has decided to use the same icon as Firefox.

To capitalize on this lining up of the planets, a website has been established to crown this icon as the standard identifier of feeds: feedicons.com. Now, I thought this was a good idea, and wanted to use the standard icon over on my left sidebar here in Blogger land. So, I wondered. Will the HTML IMG tag work with a .ICO file? If so, all I have to do is reference the favicon of feedicons.com!

Well, I've done so, and it works with Firefox 1.5, at least. Please let me know if you see the little icon next to the "XML (Atom)" over on the left.

Tags: icons, feed, favicon, feedicon

Bush law-flouting makes techies speak out

2005-12-29T16:33:00.000-05:00

There's a website called memorandum.com, that keeps track of what topics bloggers are writing about. They keep it segregated into two sections: Politics and Tech. Watching this site recently, an interesting phenomenon emerged. The general topic of President Bush's secret authorization of domestic spying without warrants was fairly active on the Politics side, but absolutely exploded on the Tech side! I think I can understand why, too. My personal blog here would usually be considered a tech blog. I'm a geek and I write about the geeky things I like to do. But even I posted about Bush and the NSA.

Maybe it's the cryptography background. I was a crypto programmer for a few years, and maybe that makes me pay just a bit more attention to what the NSA is up to. Another associate of mine from those days is the always-good-for-a-security-soundbite Bruce Schneier. Bruce has weighed in on the issue as well, giving some important historical perspective in his blog post Schneier on Security: Project Shamrock.

Maybe I'll start writing other people's Congressmen. I dunno -- we gotta do somthing here.

Tags: politics, bush, civilrights, schneier

A letter to my Congressman

2005-12-19T17:17:00.000-05:00

Perry Metzger, a bright man whom I recall from my days years ago as a crypto engineer, wrote the following editorial piece on the Cryptography Mailing List: A Small Editorial About Recent Events. In case you don't follow links, it's about President Bush's unapologetic admission that he has been authorizing domestic surveillance without court orders for years, and that he intends to keep doing so. This outraged me when I first read about it, but the news often outrages me and I do nothing about it. Perry's editorial struck a nerve. He's right, we all should be doing something about this one.

So, I wrote my first-ever letter to my long-time Congressman, Bill Pascrell. It went like this;

Congressman Pascrell,

You've been my Congressman for an awfully long time, and I've always
admired the job you do, and have never felt the need to write to you
before.  Today, I feel I must, even though I expect you are already
feel as I do.

I'm contacting you in regards to President Bush's recent admission
of surveillance of U.S. citizens without benefit of warrants or court
orders.  This is clearly a violation of the law (U.S. Code 50 USC 1801
- 50 USC 1811), and the President must be held accountable.  Please do
whatever you can.  The rule of law is the most important precept in our
republic, and no one can be allowed to ignore it, no matter how noble
the reason.

Thanks for your attention.

Jim Russell
Nutley NJ

I'll be following up with letters to Senator Lautenberg and Senator-in-Waiting Menendez. I realize that having a Democratic Congressman and two Democratic senators make my letters a bit like preaching to the choir, but I want to make sure they understand the level of anger and fear that the President's actions have instilled. There were plenty of legal methods to accomplish what he wanted. No one, especially the President, should be able to ignore the law.

Tags: politics, bush, civilrights, congress

Google's Blogger Web Comments: Legal bugs, coding bugs?

2005-12-18T21:30:00.000-05:00

In the posting Getting to Know You, Tristan Lewis speculates on Google's motives for providing their new Firefox extension, Blogger Web Comments. The analysis makes a lot of sense, and is probably close to the mark. I'm glad someone is reading the License Agreements for me.

I had already installed the extension before reading the post, and probably would have taken the risk of keeping it installed for a while. However, I've recently been having runaway memory problems with Firefox on my Debian GNU/Linux system. At first, I had attributed it to upgrading to the latest "firefox" package in the Debian Unstable repository. Then, it struck me that it was quite possible that Google's extension was to blame. The timeframe seemed right — the swapfile thrashing and glacial response in Firefox has only been happening for the last few days.

So, I've uninstalled the extension. So far (a couple of hours), no more runaway memory problems. I tend to believe that the Google extension was the culprit. If the memory problems come back, I'll update the post and try to lay the blame elsewhere.

UPDATE: The Google extension has been exonerated. Firefox caused another memory-eating episode today, with the extension removed. In the meantime, Debian Unstable has moved their "firefox" package from the repeating-decimal version 1.4999... to version 1.5. I've updated, and now I wait to see if anything has been fixed. You know what would be nice? If Debian's package-management system would show some sort of changelog.

Tags: google, firefox, debian, linux

The Town Play

2005-11-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

You'll notice that one of the entries in my wiseacre tagline is amateur actor. I actually considered acting as a profession long ago, but it turns out that doing it for the love of the theatre, while hacking computers to pay the mortgage, has worked out just fine for me.

Northern New Jersey is the perfect place for amateur actors, since you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a community theatre. I've done some CT shows, but the bulk of my post-college acting career has been with The Celtic Theatre Company, not coincidentally in residence at my alma mater, Seton Hall.

But, as Arlo Guthrie said, that's not what I came to tell you about.

There's a wonderful tradition here in the town of Nutley, one of the little things that makes the town a somewhat anachronistic throwback in this collection of little cities orbiting the Big Apple. We have a town play. Once a year, the town's Department of Parks and Recreation produces a full-scale musical, with all actors being Nutley residents. I mean, how Mayberry can you get? But it's great. I've gotten the opportunity to share the stage with my children, and share my love of acting with my neighbors. Plus, I never did the old-school musicals when I was young, so things like Annie Get Your Gun are new experiences for me.

So, the town play's come around again this year, and it's Oliver! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.) And I'm playing Fagin. Seeing as how this is a personal blog, I'm going to occasionally toss in a post on how things are going.

Lesson learned from Sony CD infection

2005-11-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

As the blogs go wild posting the latest tidbit about Sony BMG CDs (the story has even made The New York Times), I suggest we stop and reflect for a bit.

By placing active Windows programs on what was supposed to be an audio CD, Sony BMG in effect launched an attack on your system -- if you run Windows, that is. In most cases, the attack is successful. But why? What defensive measure let you down here?

One of the biggest annoyances with Windows is the Autorun feature. This is the feature where the operating system detects insertion of a CD and then decides for you what to do about it. Luckily, the real geeks at Microsoft, the ones who actually write the Windows code, knew that this feature should be optional. Even more luckily, the folks who produce the O'Reilly book series Annoyances have a website that tells you how to turn off Autorun. Do it. Turn it off.

Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, boycott, autorun, windows, security

Brilliant post at the Republic of Geektronica

2005-11-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite blogs is The Republic of Geektronica. The latest post is a great example of why this is so.

Go read it.

No more Sony CDs for me

2005-11-13T21:24:00.000-05:00

I buy a lot of music. I've posted a few photos of a small part of my collection of CDs here. I'll note that in both photos, the CDs are two rows deep. This is in addition to over 1000 vinyl records, cassettes, and music DVDs. The point here is that the recording industry should be considering me as one of their best customers.

With that in mind, I'm making a pledge right now to never buy another CD from Sony BMG, or any future version of that corporation. This is tough, because Sony BMG owns the back catalog of a lot of my favorite artists -- Bruce Springsteen, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan. But I've decided that I now have had enough of their corporate contempt, and can find other places to satisfy my musical cravings.

If you haven't been following the tech news, you can catch up on it starting with this engadget.com entry. Short version: some Sony CDs automatically install software on computers when inserted in the CD-ROM drive; nasty, sneaky software that is as bad as any virus or spyware. Well, I don't need their product anymore. I'll be getting any new music from archive.org, where it's perfectly legal to download, copy to my hard disk, burn onto a CD, etc. And for the old favorites, why, I'm buying a new turntable.

UPDATE: Another link, this time pointing out that Sony's licensing of these not-really-CDs-anymore is quite alarming.

UPDATE: Wired columnist Dan Goodin goes even further, proposing a boycott of Sony. Sounds like a plan, because Sony is so far treating this as a PR gaffe, and still acts as though they did nothing wrong.

Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, boycott

Head Lemur's got copyright right

2005-11-03T01:11:00.000-05:00

I just read a terrific opinion piece on copyright, that perfectly sums up my feelings on the topic. Rather than restate what's already been said so well, I'll just suggest that you click here and read the Head Lemur's post.

Usually, I hate blog entries that just point to other blog entries, but this deserves a wide audience.

Tags: copyright

NetFlix class action? OPT OUT!

2005-11-03T00:59:00.000-05:00

Did you ever get one of those "official" letters saying that you may be entitled to something because of a class-action lawsuit? I hope by now it is starting to become common knowledge that this is the biggest con game going. If you don't believe me, check out the latest one, a suit against NetFlix. Pay particular attention to what you would get, what the initiator gets, and most importantly, what the lawyers get.

There's only one way for you and me to fight this lunacy. OPT OUT! Don't take the crappy little token they offer -- the five bucks or one month free or whatever. Take the time to send in the form that says to these bottom-feeders that they do not represent you or your interests. 'Cause they don't.

Tags: netflix, lawsuit, classaction

Slashdotting the Speaker

2005-10-27T22:01:00.000-04:00

I've been an avid reader of Slashdot for years, but only occasionally submit a story to them. It does, however, always give me a 15-seconds-of-fame feeling when they pick my submission. That happened today, when I submitted an item about Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the House, starting his own blog. The story got picked up, and the comments started flying. Now, by Slashdot standards, this was small potatoes -- I've seen stories that generated thousands of comments. What didn't occur to me until I started reading the comments, though, was that I had just unleashed the Slashdot Effect on the unsuspecting Congressman.

Ah, well, it will be an good learning experience for him. I hope the server holds up okay.

As a follow-up to the prior post, I've been flipping back and forth between Flock and Firefox for a while. Flock has some nice features, but I lose Flash and GreaseMonkey when I'm in it. Also, I tried to post this entry with their built-in blogging, and it gave me a very Microsoft-like error message -- in other words, one that doesn't actually tell you what went wrong. Note to the Flock developers: More error information is better than less. Especially for a "Developer Preview".

Tags: slashdot, congress

Testing the Flock browser

2005-10-20T18:49:00.000-04:00

I got an email today inviting me to test the "Developer Preview" of Flock, a new Mozilla-based web browser. The interesting thing about it is that it is designed to integrate with social bookmarking sites, blog sites, and other collaborative uses of the web. In fact, I'm writing this blog entry inside Flock's blog editor, as one of my initial tests. If you're reading this, the test worked.

If this is a new paragraph, it's worked even better.

I think I'll try running this in lieu of Firefox for a while, and see what my comfort level is. So far, for a pre-beta, it looks very, very promising.

Live365 radio from the command line

2005-10-13T22:11:00.000-04:00

One of my passions is the music of Harry Nilsson. Luckily for me, one of the perks of the Internet Age is that finding others that share your passions is pretty easy. For Nilsson fans around the world, the website and mailing list run by Roger Smith has been the medium for that sharing. (Click on Harry's name above to see Roger's site.)

One of the longtime members of the NilssonWeb is Tom Westendorf, or "Old Tom" as he calls himself. Recently, Old Tom started a radio station on Live365.com, heavily featuring our Harry in the playlist. Naturally, I wanted to hear it. I couldn't, however, stand the idea of having to run a graphical client or a web browser in order to listen. I run Linux, after all, so I'm no stranger to the command line. Not to mention that we're talking about audio streaming here. There's no pictures, folks, so why should a GRAPHICAL User Interface be required?

This leads me to this episode's Scripting Pet Trick, which requires only two appications installed on your box: curl, an incredibly useful URL retriever, and mplayer, the best media player ever.

The trick here is to tell curl to remember the cookies it gets when browsing Live365, using the Unix 'cut' utility to pull information out of the cookie jar, and feeding that information into the URL for mplayer.

Other things to note: you have to register (free) with Live365.com, and get your userid and password, and fill them in at the top of the script. Obviously, this is not a secure way of handling things. I should probably have the script ask me the password every time. Also, you'll see that I had to yank the userid out of the session cookie value before passing it to mplayer. I'm also hard-coded to Tom's station here. You may want to browse Live365 for some other choices.

The script:

#! /bin/sh

USERID=useridgoeshere
PASSWD=passwordgoeshere

curl --cookie-jar curlcookies   --output curldump --location-trusted "http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/login.cgi?url=http://www.live365.com/index.live&membername=${USERID}&password=${PASSWD}"

SANE=`grep SaneID curlcookies | cut -f7`
SESS=`grep sessionid curlcookies | cut -f7 | sed s/${USERID}%3A//`

# Westendorf radio
STATION=326329

mplayer "http://www.live365.com/play/${STATION}?SaneID=${SANE}&membername=${USERID}&session=${SESS}"

Happy streaming! (Oh, and Tom? Nice playlist...)

Tags: live365, streaming, audio, linux, curl, mplayer, sh, nilsson

Hacking the playlist II

2005-09-28T23:07:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I was extolling the virtues of the moosic audio server, and mentioned that I wanted to create a nice on-screen display showing what's currently playing. As it turns out, it's much easier than I hoped, thanks to two useful Perl modules: Audio::Moosic and X::Osd.

So, without further ado, here's the Perl script. I call it moosic_osd.pl, but you can call it whatever you like.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use Audio::File;
use Audio::Moosic;
use X::Osd;

my $osd = X::Osd->new(3); # arg means 3 lines

$osd->set_font("-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1");
$osd->set_colour("Red");
$osd->set_timeout(30);
$osd->set_pos(XOSD_bottom);
$osd->set_align(XOSD_right);
$osd->set_horizontal_offset(0);
$osd->set_vertical_offset(10);
$osd->set_shadow_offset(1);

my $moo = Audio::Moosic::Unix->new();

while (1)
{
    my $fspec = $moo->current;

    if (! $fspec)
    {
        $artist = "John Lennon";
        $title = "Two minutes silence";
        $album = "";
    }
    else
    {
        my $af = Audio::File->new($fspec);
        $artist = $af->tag->artist() || "";
        $title = $af->tag->title() || "";
        $album = $af->tag->album() || "";
    }
    $osd->string(0, $title);
    $osd->string(1, $artist);
    $osd->string(2, $album);

    sleep(1);
}

So, copy and paste that somewhere, and run it as a background job:

perl ./moosic_osd.pl &

...and you'll get a nice little on-screen display.

Tags: moosic, perl, sh, osd, linux

GP2X will be Dad's toy

2005-09-23T10:45:00.000-04:00

My son gets all the good stuff. The Rio Karma, the PS2, the GameCube. Every time some cool gadget comes along, someone in the friends-and-relations gift mill buys it for my son. Hell, sometimes it's me, as in the case of the Karma. That, of course, was part of my open-standards education program for him, since the Karma had support for Ogg Vorbis format audio files. So, I don't begrudge him his teenager toys.

I do get jealous, though.

The one that hurt the most was the Playstation Portable (PSP). My wife happened to be at Target the day the PSP was released, and happened to ask the electronics clerk about it, and he happened to have one that hadn't already been claimed. So we had one in the house on the day of release. I wasn't allowed to claim it for myself, because my wife already had it on my son's gifting schedule.

It's just as well, because it's my turn now. The GP2X is coming out in October, and I've already pre-ordered. I'm a long-time Linux hacker, and now a portable game machine with a Linux kernel and bundled SDK comes along. At the risk of employing an overused geek codeword, w00t!

And yes, I know about the DRM, as reported on BoingBoing. The UK folks have posted a reasonable explanation, and I'm going to take them at their word.

So, it should be here sometime next month, at which time I'll report on it. And, in case I didn't make this clear: This one is mine, son.

UPDATE: Officially, it's called the GP2X, not the GPX2, so I fixed that.

Tags: gp2x

If I'm not here, it's Wikipedia's fault.

2005-09-15T10:24:00.000-04:00

It's fairly obvious that blogging has not become an obsession with me. Let's see... I haven't checked in since March. For me, that's not bad.

A lot of my online time these days is spent contributing to Wikipedia. For those people who haven't encountered this yet, it's an encyclopedia inside a wiki, with no edit restrictions. In other words, anyone on the net can edit any page, either credited or anonymous. Short-term accuracy is always questionable, but most pages end up with concerned nannies watching for every edit and pouncing on incorrect information and vandalism.

All the regulars in this wiki, who have dubbed themselves Wikipedians, tend to gravitate into interest groups. I've ended up concentrating on musical theatre, certain favorite rock and roll performers, and chess. My two major contributions were articles on Harry Nilsson and Jack Gilford.

I encourage everyone to stop by the Wikipedia, and can guarantee that if you surf there for more than five minutes, you will end up editing something.

Tags: wikipedia

Hacking the playlist

2005-03-18T01:12:00.000-05:00

Now playing: Bruce Springsteen / Lost in the flood

I've amassed a, well, massive amount of recorded music over the years. Lately, I've been methodically encoding it all to computer-readable formats, so that I now have a 20 gigabyte disk partition full of .mp3 and .ogg files. I've got no time to assemble playlists. What I want is to have a program to which I can say, "Go look in /media/music, and shuffle the lot."

Now playing: The Beatles / Mr. Moonlight (alt version from Anthology 1)

For the past year or so, I've been using the open source program gqmpeg for this purpose. There were two minor annoyances I found with this setup. First, it took forever to load up that 20 gig into its playlist. Second, I was tied to my X Windows session, because the player is tied to its GUI frontend. I wanted the player to manage the playlist invisibly. If I want to see what's going on, I'll ask the playlist manager.

Now playing: Original cast of 'Take Me Along' / We're home

So, I went on a search for a new playlist manager, and found moosic. Now, this does exactly what I want. It separates the playlist manager functionality from the user interface, and its default user interface is command-line! Outstanding.

Now playing: Leon Redbone / She's my gal

Naturally, I couldn't leave well enough alone. The one weakness I saw with moosic is when I asked it what the currently playing song was, it would reply with the full filename. Well, I add nice Artist, Title and Album tags to my .oggs, so I want to see them. So, it's time for a Perl Hack.

#! /usr/bin/env perl -w

use Audio::File;
use Audio::Moosic;

my $moo = Audio::Moosic::Unix->new();

my $fspec = $moo->current;
my $af = Audio::File->new($fspec);

my $artist = $af->tag->artist() || "";
my $title = $af->tag->title() || "";
my $album = $af->tag->album() || "";

print "$artist\n$title\n$album\n";

Now, of course, if you want constant display, a nice shell script will take care of that.

#! /bin/sh

onscreen=
while true
do
 playing=`perl ./main.pl`
 if [ ! "$playing" = "$onscreen" ]
 then
     clear
     perl ./main.pl
     onscreen=$playing
 fi
 sleep 10
done

By the way, the reason I separated this into the perl and shell portions (other than the fact that this is the Unix Way) is that eventually I'm going to pipe the output of the perl script into osd_cat, which does overlaid text.

Now playing: Clannad / Dheanainn sugradh

Eventually, this is going to lead to my extremely local radio station (only within the walls of the house), but that can wait until next post.

Tags: moosic, perl, sh, linux

The DVD shelf

2005-03-16T12:28:00.000-05:00

It's almost spring here in New Jersey, which means it's finally time for me to review my Christmas present, the DVD collection of the first five Marx Brothers movies. Hmm. How can I put this kindly? You know, I can't, so let me just jump right in. These movies are in horrible condition, and it looks like Universal made absolutely no effort at restoring them. The movies themselves are just as funny as I remember them, but it's really a shame that they've been released with such a shoddy transfer.

Much more satisfying is Warner Brothers' work on the Looney Tunes releases. The two "Golden Collection" DVD sets that have been released so far feature magnificent restorations of the classic animation shorts, great commentaries, and lots of extras. I highly recommend these.

Bit of a dry spell

2004-12-06T13:34:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me today that I hadn't made an entry to this random journal for quite a while. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps I just had nothing useful to say for seven months. Many a blog will fill up pages and pages with seven months of nothing to say. At least I've saved Google a few seconds of indexing.

It's the festive Winter Solstice season, which turns a greedy fellow like myself to thoughts of composing a Christmas Want List. On the top of this year's list is the DVD box set of the first five Marx Brothers movies. I've been getting my Marx fixes from old VHS off-air tapings for years now, so the new copies will be welcomed. I've heard that they didn't bother with a restoration, though. Bummer. If Santa comes through, I'll post a review come Boxing Day (give or take seven months).

Fifteen minutes for the Alma Mater

2004-05-12T23:47:00.000-04:00

My old high school was mentioned by Jay Leno in his opening monologue recently. On Friday, 30 April, he used the following joke.

Angry parents protested outside the Queen of Peace High School in North Arlington, N.J. yesterday because they were upset that the spring musical at the school this year is Cabaret. It's a play that deals with issues of homosexuality. Well, thank God they're picketing. The last thing you want is kids in the theater department being exposed to is anything gay.

Naturally, my first thought had nothing to do with the topic at hand. There's still a bizarre little thrill associated with having some obscure part of your life exposed to millions of people on television. I've been seeing Pizzaland for five years in the opening credits of The Sopranos, and it's still pretty cool, since I spent an inordinate amount of my teen years eating there. I especially liked the theatre angle of the QP story, since virtually all of my good memories of high school involved the drama club in some way.

Eventually, though, I got past the Warholian nature of the Tonight Show reference, and started thinking about the reality behind it. Parents protesting a high school show? Cabaret? In what century do these parents live, and what can we do to get them to join us here in the 21st?

After a little fact-checking, I discovered that the protests were nothing more than a few small-minded people, and that the attendant publicity made for packed houses. The actors took the protests in stride, and had a good show. More power to them.

Does the Subject become the Title?

2004-05-11T22:38:00.000-04:00

I expect email to be a primary form of entry, so I'm hoping this works out well.

I'm adding HTML markup to the text, while sending it as a text email. I don't know if that will fly.

In a few weeks time I should have a decent Supplemental Guide to blogger.com ready for publication.

2004-05-11T14:33:00.000-04:00

this is from the pager - i expect that blog entries from here will be short and sweet

Metablogging

2004-05-11T14:12:00.000-04:00

For the first few entries, I need to experiment. Most of the blog entries will be about the blogging process itself, as I attempt through trial and error to find my own personal method.

I don't like blogger.com's post editor, at least with the version of Mozilla I'm currently using. Pressing the little bold and italic icons clear the text I had previously typed. This is the third time I've tried to write the Metablogging post.

I've resorted to the same method I always end up resorting to in web development -- typing in the HTML markup elements by hand. It's a control issue, and probably the same reason I ended up a programmer in the first place.

As a test of my linking abilities, here's a link to my home page at jimmyrussell.com.

The next blog entry will be a test of my "remote" capabilities. I walk around with a two-way Motorola pager hooked into Skytel. It has the ability to send outgoing emails, using a really tiny keyboard. Since blogger.com allows email updates, I'd like to see if I can update using the pager.

On the trailing edge

2004-05-11T11:35:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I'm a bit late in jumping on the blogwagon. Usually I'm a bit ahead of the curve. I was surfing the web before there were pictures on it. I visited Yahoo before they had their own domain name. I've had my own vanity website for ages. Yet, I have managed to avoid creating a weblog, until today. Now that this intolerable situation has been rectified, I wonder what I will do with this site. There are plenty of directions I could take it. Professional interests (software development), avocations (music, community theatre), life, the Universe, everything. We shall see.