A Man and his Penguin

It occurred to me today: There seem to be very few genuine attractive female pop singers these days!

Years ago, male pop fans had plenty of choices, from Thaila and Becky (AllSTARS) to Kym Marsh (Hears’Say) to Charli (Hi-5). Now it seems that the only attractive pop stars are Miley Cyrus and the ever-present Kylie. But Kylie is 40 and Miley is 15 - and I’m no Annie Leiberweitz pedophile.

I tried looking up photos of Operator Please, but then I realised "Hey, I don’t like their music or their songwriting, and I don’t find the girls appealing, so why the hell am I looking up photos of them?"

I do actually like the group Alphabeat, but it’s difficult to find their MP3s on BeeMP3 CDs in stores.

Maybe the extraordinary lack of attractive girls of pop is why I’ve been obsessing so much about Amanda Bynes.

Yay, it finally finished downloading while I was at work! I’ve just watched it, and Amanda is really really good in it. It’s a cross between Revenge Of The Nerds and Snow White, done in the style of an Amanda Bynes movie.

My favourite bit was when Amanda looked cute and hot, which I guess doesn’t narrow it down

Nah but seriously, it was well worth the shocking amount of time required to download it. I’ll definitely buy it on DVD; it really was a hoot!

In one scene, they clearly show a Macintosh getting hacked. What’s hilarious is that Apple actually provided the computer specially for the movie - they should’ve looked at the script before loaning the machine!

In other news, on Ten HD today there was a documentary about the timescale that our bodies work on. They showed some scientists who were clearly running Linux or Unix. It looked like either an early version of Gnome or maybe IceWM, with four LCD monitors!

The documentary, and the knowledge that my computer was sitting idle at home, gave me the idea to get one of the distributed computing projects. After a lot of deliberation ("Which will be more beneficial to people? Does it matter if this one doesn’t support multiple cores?"), I decided on Folding@Home, the uniprocessor edition. I think I enabled big work units - according to my calculations, that’s 8 hours just to do one work unit, and my processor is incredibly fast per core.

I’m an hour and a quarter overdue for bed, so I’ll leave it there for now. See you all later.

Some fake screenshots of Windows 7 have been released. They’re quite good fakes, referring to possibly-to-be-existent hardware products, and including lots of transparent windows and transparent circular menus… transparency and compositing all around.

Someone posted a comment on OSnews.com saying that they hated everything on the desktop to be transparent. The user phoehne replied with this gem:

In fact, they’re going to make the monitor transparent. That way,
you’ll be able to see the dust accumulating in the corner of your
cubicle behind your monitor. Transparent text on a transparent field,
over a transparent background with a transparent monitor. This is part
of their new push toward corporate transparency.

I cacked myself

I went out at 2 o’clock and got back at 5pm. In three hours, it downloaded a mere 76 megabytes of Sydney White. Pathetic. It uploaded 132 megabytes. It’s actually called ADSL because it’s "asymmetric" - higher download speeds than upload speeds, so this is ridiculous that my upload speed is higher.
   

Right now I’m downloading the movie Sydney White, as of course I’m a huge Amanda Bynes fan. Don’t worry, I’ll buy the movie on DVD when it comes out (I actually own two bought copies of Hairspray, so there!).

According to my calculations, by the time I download the movie once, I will have uploaded it twice. In 14 hours, it’s downloaded 297 megabytes and uploaded 405 megabytes. It’s also caused the wireless driver to fail once and my card to lose connection to the modem once as well!

I have 10 ports open in the hope that more people downloading from me will equal more people uploading to me, but it looks like the Bittorrent theory falls down here. And thanks to the (excellent and very clever) way that Bittorrent handles downloads in segments, I can’t even watch what I’ve already downloaded!

Oh well. I should have the rest of the movie in 19 hours time.

I tried logging into Faceparty today to check if anyone had sent me any birthday messages. Account not found. There was a 10,000 word essay saying about variaous reasons why my account might’ve been deleted; no, I am *NOT* on the UK sex offender registry, I *did* have pictures on my profile, I’m *not* 50 years old and using Faceparty in leiu of an online dating site.

Some notice would have been nice, as would a reason. I’ve been with Faceparty for years.

If they’re going to do this, then they can get fucked.

I discovered WinFF today; it’s a GUI frontend for FFMpeg that works on Windows and Linux. I immediately thought "Hey, this could be a good replacement for Blacklight". I’d often been thinking that a dedicated Walkman-loading utility was a bit ridiculous and that the appropriate settings should be available in other software. Plus, it being able to work on Windows means I don’t have to make a Windows port of Blacklight.

I did think "I’ll just add a basic patch to WinFF to allow it to encode to the settings required by the Walkman", but I’ve just had a look at the website and WinFF is written in PASCAL! The 1980s called - they want their programming language back! Surprisingly enough, I did learn a tiny bit of Pascal in 1999, I think - but I remember none of it, and it was all pretty simple stuff.

Still, I can add a feature request to their bugtracker with the exact settings required by the Walkman, and hopefully they’ll add it!

Recently I’ve been hearing more people saying "If Linux is to succeed on the desktop, it needs to bury the terminal".

I’d take exception to this: As someone else recently pointed out, Windows 3.1 was a successful desktop operating system that required the terminal, and one of Vista’s selling points is the improved terminal.

What things do users need the terminal for on Linux? Can we maybe debunk some myths?

1. Installing Linux. No, not unless you’re installing Slackware. Not even Gentoo requires it.

2. Monitor configuration. It’s still possible that Xorg won’t correctly detect your monitor and you’ll have to go into /etc/X11/Xorg.conf, but such things are getting very rare. Very rare indeed. Xorg switches automatically to a "safe" graphics mode if all else fails, so you can use a GUI-based monitor configuration program.

So, generally no terminal use needed.

3. Installing drivers for things that are not supported in-kernel. Yes. If you have a device that is supported by a third-party driver that is not already either in your kernel or packaged for your distribution, then you will need the kernel headers (easily installed), build-essential (easily installed) and your terminal.

I once had to compile a newer version of ALSA to deal with the sound chipset on someone’s brand-new laptop. Once I had the kernel headers and build-essential, both of which are installed through Synaptic, it took three short commands in the terminal to install the new ALSA.

./configure
make
sudo make install

Not rocket science.

Answer: Terminal use required, but it’s reasonably unlikely and not hard.

4. Installing software. Terminal use is not necessary as the most popular and most mature software is available either from the Synaptic Package Manager or as Debian packages straight from the developer. Software that doesn’t require the terminal to install is also likely to become more popular.

Even things like the Google Earth installer, which requires invoking from a terminal, is not strictly necessary, as Google Earth is packaged up as a .deb anyway and put onto Medibuntu. Same with Flash Player and Skype.

The only exception is if you were going to compile software from source code. This definitely requires the terminal. However, who actually *needs* bleeding-edge versions of the software? I know I don’t - I haven’t compiled any software for a long time. I’m even surprised I have build-essential installed on my system. The fact is, most software ends off getting compiled FOR YOU ALREADY.

The only exceptions would be if you wanted to install new software on an outdated distro, or if you wanted to install semi-obscure software on a non-x86 platform. Most people do neither, preferring to keep their distro up-to-date and stick to commodity Intel/AMD processors.

Answer: Terminal not necessary.

5. Mounting devices: Happens automatically for you. No terminal needed.

6. Video Editing: No terminal needed. To capture video from a Firewire device like a digital video camera, you need to give your user account permissions to access the Firewire device:

sudo chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394

This is actually a security feature, because once it is possible for your user account to read and write directly to Firewire devices, an attacker working from within your user account can read or write the entire system memory. I believe you can create a new group called "disks" and add your user account to this group, to gain raw access to Firewire devices without having to put in that command. This would require no terminal commands, it just depends if you want to live with the risk. Millions of Windows users live with the "Firewire being able to access your whole system memory" feature turned on. Maybe it’s an acceptable risk for you.

7. Setting up a web server. I know it’s not something that "ordinary users" generally do, but there are useful benefits to setting one up temporarily. It’s easily accomplished without the terminal: Just install the Apache2 package from the Synaptic Package Manager. It’s automatically started for you, and set up to start on bootup. If you want to make it unavailable temporarily, just block port 80 on your ADSL router. To put files into your web server’s folder, just drop them into /var/www/. You need to be root to do this - just install the package "nautilus-gksu", reboot, right-click the /var/www directory and choose "Open as Administrator".

Answer: No terminal needed.

8. Printing and wireless configuration: Choose what printer you have. That’s it. No terminal needed there. To set up my wireless connection, I just went to NetworkManager on my top panel and told it which network to connect to, and then I put in my password. Piece of piss. No terminal needed. No geekishness; it’s all a friendly GUI that shows the names, signal strengths and whether or not a network is encrypted.

9. Video encoding. I maintain that this is better done in the terminal with ffmpeg, but if you’re squeamish you can use any number of GUI frontends for ffmpeg, mencoder or transcode. I even use Kdenlive (video editor) as a video encoder if I don’t care so much about having precise control over the output.

I did find a time when no transcoding frontend utility worked; that’s when I bought a Sony Walkman MP3/Video player which is incredibly fussy about video formats. It requires H.264 of a precise bitrate, AAC audio with Low-Complexity compression, and for the moon to be 30 degrees above its zenith, before it will play the video. No GUI-based video encoder could set those settings with such fine granularity to satisfy the Walkman. So I figured out how to do it in the command-line, and then wrote a nice GUI program to run the command-line program.

10. Run Windows programs. Yes, you do really need the terminal for this. Wine is the program that allows some Windows programs to run on Linux. Since it’s not perfect, it sometimes spits out error messages into an attached terminal to help you find the right DLLs or settings to have it run your program properly. To recieve these error messages, you need to have started the Windows program in a terminal.

So yes, you need a terminal to run Windows programs. Once again, though, it’s an *easy* command:

wine "/home/chris/Elastomania/Elma.exe"

You don’t even need to type in the path of the program - just type "wine " and a space, and then drag the file onto the terminal.

Let it also be said that if you were to run a Linux or Unix program in Cygwin on your Windows computer, you’d need an MS-DOS prompt open to conduct the installation. And once you know that your Windows program works in Wine, you won’t need to start it in a terminal, and you can just set up a launcher for it.

11. Adding repositories. A resounding "No" - just go to Software Sources under System > Administration, and add your repos there. You will get warnings about unauthenticated packages, but if you’re installing software from a third party repository I imagine that you have accepted the risk of malicious software.

So, does Linux require you to learn complicated, archaic commands? Of course not. Does Linux require any terminal use for regular tasks? Yes, if it doesn’t get your monitor settings right (uncommon these days!), if you want to run Windows programs, or if you need hardware support over and above what shipped with your distribution. Are those commands difficult? Hell no!

Many people believe that Linux requires terminal commands because of either social inertia (they still believe what was once true) or because they see Linux users helping eachother with problems by using terminal commands. The latter has a simple explanation: It’s quicker and more precise to give a terminal command rather than GUI clicks and drags. So that’s the advice that is given.

If you’re an avid tweaker or if you want to set up advanced things like RAID, proxies, or thin-clients; then you’ll need the command-line. But then you probably won’t mind the command-line, and you’ll certainly appreciate the extra flexibility it gives you. If you’re a regular user, then don’t worry about the terminal, because you probably won’t need to use it!

Please reply with a comment to this message if you can think of something else a "regular joe" would do that requires the terminal.

I always wanted to say that I "fixed a race condition". Until fairly recently, I didn’t know what a "race condition" was, I just thought it sounded cool.

Well, I did actually fix one today in Blacklight, that had been haunting me for a long time. I think it was a race condition. I also fixed (hopefully!) the problem involving the different directory names under Ubuntu 8.04.

I’ll just package it up as a Deb, put a new little picture inside the Walkman screen in the icon, and put her up on Sourceforge.I found that a number of Linux users have these Walkmans, you see, so I want to make the program as good as possible.

I saw this posted on FS Daily:

This post is for all of you out therewho have developed or contributed to Linux/Ubuntu projects and all of the opensource coders who read this.I do not know where to send a post like this so I hope this one email will find its way in the sea of posts out there.

I thank you to the point of tears. 

Earlier this week I installed Kubuntuon a refurbished AMD computer I purchased for $184 from a discountonline vendor, it came with no OS. It now runs like a champ. 

We cant afford much and this was my 14year old daughter's birthday present this past week. She isoverjoyed. And she is already trying to tackle Adept Manager andexploring Linux; adding bling and her music, of course. 

I cant tell you how much I appreciatethe work you all have done. Its a work of art. If I could thank each and every one ofyou I would. 

You have given her the world to learn and explore. 

So if you get frustrated or tired inyour work for Open Source/Free Software, just remember that somewhere in Missourithere is a 14 year-old girl named Hope, an A-student who runs on the track team,who is now your biggest fan and one of the newest users ofLinux/Ubuntu. 

Thanks most sincerely,

R.B.A.Missouri

I was touched by R.B.A’s message. So I decided to write back:

Dear Robert,

I’m sure you’ve received a lot of e-mails thanking you for your letter of gratitude, but I’d like to add my own.

I develop a program for transcoding video to use on the Sony Walkman MP3 players; not a lot of people use it because those MP3 players aren’t terribly popular. As such I’ve let the program’s development stagnate a little.

I do also send bug reports to open-source software projects to do my bit towards making other Linux software better. Knowing that there are people out there who are truly appreciative of what us Linux-based developers do, makes it all worthwhile.

Your message gave me the impeteus to fix the two bugs in my program that have just been reported to me. I’m so glad you and your daughter are getting so much out of Free Software, and I wish you both the best of luck for the future.

Chris
Developer of Blacklight Walkman Manager