Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

These days, The Cloud is all the rage in the computer world. Cloud storage is probably as far as most folks want (or need) to go - think Box.com, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive/Docs...the list goes on. You can collect quite a bit of free off-site storage if you're of a mind to.  These are all examples of  SaaS - Software as a Service . PaaS - Platform as a Service - gives you a specific pre-configured platform to build applications or services. Finally there is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is virtualized hardware: CPUs, hard drives, networking, firewalls and the like. A little background:  at my day job at Sisyphean Corp, I manage hosting for a couple dozen big websites (I lose count sometimes).When I first took this on, we were on physical hardware. Trouble with this is once you make your decisions about the hardware, you're sort of stuck with it for a while. If you've predicted your needs poorly, or they change, well... I migrated one o...

Okay, not long after my rant about Amazon dropping support for Linux in their MP3 market place, I cooled down and did a second look. I'd rather fix my problem than bitch - here's what I figured out. In case you missed it, here's what prompted my outrage: to download albums from Amazon, you download an AMZ file, which is essentially an encoded list of URLs to the MP3s in the album. After supporting this functionality for Linux for a number of years, they suddenly dropped it. If you are a Linux user, they now inform you that you will need to download your MP3s from their Cloud Player, one file at a time . Click, download, click, download (repeat ad nauseum). If you purchase much music, this is a completely unacceptable solution. First rule of computer troubleshooting: no matter how outlandish or obscure the problem, somebody has experienced it before you. I did what any self-respecting geek did: I Googled. Breaking this down, there are actually 2 problems to solve. O...

[UPDATED AFTER MY INITIAL TANTRUM] Updated on 6-29-2014 - I looked over this post which I wrote a couple of years ago and felt like it needed an update now that I can look back on things more calmly.  For quite some time now I've bought all my tunes from Amazon. One of the reasons is that my primary desktop in my  home office is a Linux box and they provided a native downloader for album purchase (so you wouldn't need to download each song one at a time). I buy a lot of collections ("The Best 99 Songs to Clean your Bathtub, etc), and downloading the files one at a time is strictly a non-starter. I've been doing this for some time now...at least 3 or 4 years. Not long ago, they started their "Cloud Music Player" where you stored your purchases on their cloud service, where you could play them or download them. Today I went to download an album I bought a couple of weeks ago and no longer saw "Download this Album" as one of the options. Aft...

Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 8, at age 70. Most people will say "huh," upon hearing his name. I'd argue he had a much greater influence on modern computing than the late Steve Jobs. He developed C , the most widely used programming language in the world, while working at Bell Laboratories in the late 60's. He still has a home page at Bell Labs . While originally written to be used to create the Unix operating system (which Ritchie also developed, along with Ken Thompson), C is now used for writing software for computers, embedded devices, smart appliances, cellphones, consumer goods - everything from operating systems to applications to device drivers to...well, you name it. The beauty of C is that it can be compiled for any number of different platforms. C gave rise to an number of variations and spin offs - C+, C++ (I'm not making this up) as well as directly and indirectly influencing the structure and syntax of a host of other modern programm...

I've been writing HTML for about 17 years now, hard as that is to believe. I'm not a fan of WYSIWYG editors - I prefer to use text-based editors. It's how I learned, and as far as I'm concerned, usually easier. After graduating from Notepad, the first editor I bought was something called WebEdit Pro, by Luckman. It had a clean, well-organized interface and I used it for several years before I discovered HomeSite. HomeSite , originally developed by Nick Bradbury (who later went on to create TopStyle, still my favorite CSS editor) was acquired by Allaire, who sold it as a standalone editor, and as a repackaged editor for their flagship ColdFusion software. Incidently, the original freeware version, Homesite 1.2 (written for Windows 95), is still out there on the web, though it's gotten harder to find. Its feature set is pretty basic, but it's still usable, and still has fans. Google it if you're curious. I used various versions of HomeSite for a perio...

I'd sort of been wanting a netbook for a while. These dinky little toys will leave some disappointed who are looking for a cheap general purpose laptop. Understanding the design focus is on portability and battery life is key. After shopping around, I finally took the plunge and got an Acer Aspire. It had a new-ish processor (the Atom N450), a 6-cell battery, 1 GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB by swapping the chip) and a 160 GB hard drive. As with many netbooks, it came equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition , a stripped down version for the modestly powered machines. 1 GB occasionally leaves it gasping for air. I'd made up my mind to dual boot to Linux before I'd even decided on a machine. Enter Wubi . Wubi (Windows UBuntu Installer) lets you install Ubuntu Linux using a Windows-based installer. No repartitioning, no finding an external CD/DVD drive, no blowing away Windows. Download the installer in Windows, run it, choose the edition you want to install and sit back...

The youngest son had malfunctioning Free Agent external hard drive that had been acting flaky (I will never buy another Seagate drive). Did he pull it without "safely ejecting?" Hell, I don't know. All I do know is the problems started when he started using it with his Windows Vista laptop. Finally it got to the point where his machine and my Windows XP box refused to acknowledge it. Plugging it in would, 3 out of 4 times, cause my machine to freeze.  It had, in fact, become useless. So I offered to try and fix it, and recover the files if possible. The worst that  could happen would be the drive would be unusable. Like it already was. I plugged it into my Linux box (Kubuntu 9.04) and fired up gparted .  Using this I was able to identify the correct device -- /dev/sdb1. Inserting it automatically created a mount point in /media, although it did not automount it. I mounted the drive on /media/FreeAgent using the command: sudo mount -t /dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent N...

This just in: a clever person out there has managed to successfully hack his iPhone so it will boot into Google's Android OS (which also means -- he's made it boot into Linux!). Apparently he's only got this working on an older iPhone (not 3G or 3GS) but by golly -- the fact he's done it at all is pretty astonishing. There's an embedded YouTube video that demos this unnatural act in all its perverse wonderment. Somewhere there is a great disturbance in the Force. Thanks again to Slashdot for bringing this to my attention.

I have seen the future of eBooks. It's the Foxit eSlick Reader . Unlike the Kindle, Sony and other eBook readers which use document formats that lock you down to a single source, this one reads PDFs. While Adobe originally created PDF as a proprietary format, they released it as an open standard on July 1, 2008. While Kindle and its kin are well made devices, the reliance on a single entity is problematic: should the company decide to discontinue the device and end support for the document format, you're screwed. With the eSlick Reader, even if Foxit stops making the unit, you'll be able to continue to get new books, as well as read the books on any other device (including your computer) that reads PDFs. Quoting from the overview page, The eSlick Reader has an internal memory of 512MB and comes with a 2 GB SD card (supports up to 4 GB). Resolution is 600 x 800 pixel. As with almost every other device out there, it also plays MP3s (great for audio books). It also ...

Okay -- a follow up on my previous post about KDE 4's apparent memory leak. Despite following the steps I listed I found I was still prone to creeping molasses. Here's what I ended up doing, which seems to have helped. First, uninstalled all of the widget libraries I could locate (relax -- I reinstalled them). Then I went in and basically re-installed KDE 4, using Synaptic. I'll note for the record I don't have a lot of love for the newest release of Adept; it's a sorry downgrade of the version that came with KDE 3. Next I installed OpenBox , which is an alternative window manager. Once completed, I had the option, when logging in, of starting my session with KDE / OpenBox. This substitutes the OpenBox window manager for Kwin , the default KDE window manager, while retaining the KDE look and feel. Compared to Kwin, OpenBox is a light weight . I confess, I can see no discernible difference between the two once I've logged in -- other than the fact tha...

For the last month or so my Kubuntu Linux box has been plagued by a particular problem: after running for a little while it would gradually become more and more unresponsive, to the point of unusability. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on a pretty quick Intel chip, with 2 GB of memory. I've got a 256 MB NVidia video card to boot -- one previously purchased by youngest son (the gamer). I'd walk away from my desktop and find when I came back it was stuck in molasses. Clicking on a button would do .... nothing. I'd have to hold the mouse button down and wait.  And wait.  And wait . Usually I've found this sort of weirdness can be explained by overheating, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Couple that with the fact that I didn't see the problem when running another window manager and signs pointed to an issue with KDE 4. After suffering through this for a while, I discussed the situation with clever youngest son ( now a freshman computer science / inf...

Warning - geek alert: If you work with Windows and Linux/Unix, you need to rush out and get MobaXTerm , a free (but not open source) tool. It takes the GNU/Cygwin collection of command line Unix/Linux tools and puts them in a single Windows executable. Think of it as DOS on super steroids. Now obviously this isn't for everyone. Frankly, it's not for the many. But if you're one of the chosen few who have a feet in both the Microsoft and Linux world, you are going to love this. One of the best features of MobaXTerm is that it includes a built in Xserver, for connecting with a graphical interface to Unix/Linux environments. There are several ways of doing this. Though it requires a little setup on the front end, using Xdmcp is the easiest way to have a complete X remote session. To do this will require a preliminary bit of editing some text-based config files on the command line. It will also require you have root access through sudo. Don't worry, it's easy. H...

Despite the vague sense of dis-ease that accompanied my Kubuntu upgrade from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), I had, after my earlier struggles with the death of Kaudiocreator and general crapping up of Adept, finally gotten to the point where the system was behaving more or less as I expected. All was right in the land of the penguin. Until 3 days ago. A while ago, a co-worker had turned me on to the virtues of CVS -- Concurrent Versions System, a revision control system . I now use it for a variety of things: several writing projects and websites. I know it sounds dorky, but I swear it's not. I went to update the local CVS repository on one of the several XP boxes scattered around the house. I use Tortoise CVS, where the sound of breaking glass means a bad thing has happened. It sounded like I fell through a freaking window. The CVS server on the upgraded Kubuntu box is now busted to all bloody hell. The files in the repository are all apparently safe and sound but...

My good friend and occasional intellectual sparring partner, the Whited Sepulchre , recently complained on Facebook, " I want to know why we have to tolerate living in a country where you're only allowed one iPod account per computer. " To which I say: if you choose to use iTunes, you choose to accept that limitation. Don't like it? There are alternatives. Let's start with what's wrong with iTunes -- why you can only have one iPod account per computer. Think this was some weakness or deficiency in the iPod or iTunes? Wrong: this is broken by design, on purpose. Consider this: iTunes is not just a music manager. It's the front end to Apple's extremely lucrative digital music store. You can only have one iPod per computer because that fits their business model. If you had more than one iPod per computer, you might be able to (god forbid) share music between devices. Fear not: alternatives abound. An old Windows favorite is Winamp . It's gone from a...

Okay, after a week two weeks of dealing with the Jaunty Jackalope upgrade, I'm here to pronounce Audex a worthy successor to Kaudiocreator. I used to rip a lot of CDs, in the past primarily wih Kaudiocreator- (Kaudiocreater was an app that ran under KDE 3.5). After the upgrade to KDE 4.2 , it (along with several other apps) disappeared. I was aghast. I loved Kaudiocreator: it was, in my opinion, one of the best Linux rippers out there. Then it disappeared! I found Audex while googling at work ( during lunch! I swear! ) which promised to be more or less a replacement. I installed with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension, but quickly became a fan. Like Kaudiocreator, Audex has a clean simple mostly intuitive interface, which integrates well with KDE 4. It doesn't have its predecessor's annoying habit of failing to encode a CD if the tag editor doesn't like the genre/label pulled down by the CDDB lookup. One can set multiple encoding profiles using Ogg, MP3, Flac,...

Finally got up the nerve to upgrade my Kubuntu version of Ubuntu 8.04 ( Hardy Heron ) to 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope ). When 8.04/Hardy Heron launched, you could install it with either KDE 4 or KDE 3.5. At the time 8.04 was released, KDE 4 was (in the opinion of some) not quite ready for PrimeTime. I did an install of KDE 4 and decided to go back to 3.5. Since then, I've put off doing any upgrades. When Jaunty Jackalope was released, I read the reviews and didn't see anything that made it an extremely compelling upgrade: faster booting (I never thought it was all that slow), a new packages manager (I liked Adept), and other improvements that didn't seem all that compelling. Still, my curiosity got the best of me. At last I mustered my courage. If you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives you know this: you pretty much need to have broadband to take advantage of the myriad package management features. Now that that fact is out of the way... Upgrading is fairly simply, a...

The latest Linux Ubuntu release from Canonical, 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) , is now loosed on the internets. I'm running Kubuntu (KDE) 8.04 (Hardy Heron) right now on my main desktop computer and love it. I'm trying to decide: upgrade? The Jackalope promises faster boot times, a new package management system, an updated kernel, and KDE 4. The upgrade will probably take an hour and be relatively painless, unlike the agony soon to be experienced by all those poor chumps out there waiting to upgrade Windows 7 beta to the Release Candidate. Decisions, decisions. If none of this makes a lick of sense, don't worry: tomorrow I'll be writing about my garden.