A Man and his Penguin

(Yeah, I remembered what I was going to say)

Lately I’ve been hearing people saying "Ubuntu" and "Linux" the wrong way around - they’ve been saying things like "I installed Linux Ubuntu yesterday" rather than "Ubuntu Linux".

At first I had no idea why they say it that way around, but I now know.

People think that Linux is the name of a software company, and that the company makes a product called Ubuntu. So they say it the same way as we’d say "Microsoft Windows".

It’s getting to epidemic proportions though - an Officeworks ad in the paper very positively advertised the Acer Aspire One, which comes preinstalled with Linux. Great, but it described the machine as having "Linux Linpus" preinstalled.

Linux is not a software company, it is an essential part of an operating system called GNU/Linux. If you’re talking about Ubuntu, either call it Ubuntu or call it Ubuntu Linux. I guess the easiest way of explaining it is that it’s the Ubuntu variety of Linux, just as you might describe something as a "Lounge Chair" or an "Office Chair". Lounge and Office are the varieties, and Chair is the general object. Well, Ubuntu and Linpus are the varieties, and Linux is the general operating system.

My protest against the Beijing Olympics begins today. Well, tonight, at 8:08pm on the 8th of the 8th 08 at 8 seconds past the minute.

I always used to love watching the Olympics; I remember when I was younger I wished that the Commonwealth Games could go on forever on the TV. I still love watching the Games. But it’s fundamentally wrong to hold a goodwill competition in communist China, and because of the pollution it’s also just a bad idea to hold an athletic competition in China too.

In addition, the Games haven’t caused China to become more liberal. If anything, what with the recent arrests and "police escorting" of anyone who is disliked by the regime, the Games have caused further tightening up of the police state’s control over the people.

Disgusting behaviour. It hurts me, but I’m not going to watch the Olympics this year. Doing so would violate my principles.

I’ll hit an early hurdle tomorrow unfortunately, because all the TVs at work will be tuned to Seven. And Saturday afternoons get really quiet with not a lot to do.

I finished Guitar Hero yesterday on Medium; I bet I didn’t even have a chance to mention to y’all that I bought it! I hate being able to finish games in a matter of days. Bully took me 30+ hours, I expect my games to take 20 hours or more. I think the next games I’ll buy will be Twighlight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy as they seem to have some longevity to them.

Call me crazy, but I actually prefer the songs from Frets On Fire; there’s much more opportunity to hammer-on and pull-off than there is in the Guitar Hero songs.

My computer is still running well overclocked, so I’ll keep it that way until summer. The cold weather keeps temperatures under control.

I was to install a second DVD burner into my colleague’s Linux computer, but MCG Technology actually ran out of burners. Crazy. They’ve got more coming in on Wednesday. I do like the idea of Lightscribe now that you can do it on Linux.

I’ve got the feeling that there was something else I wanted to mention, but I can’t remember what it was. Love to you all, talk to you soon.

Chris.

I have sent a message to the ABC regarding their online downloads shop, that requires Windows and installs some third-party malware on your computer.

To Whom It May Concern,

I’m very, very disappointed. I heard about your online shop where viewers can buy downloads of ABC shows and it sounded like a good idea to me. But there are two problems that I’ve since discovered:

1. In order to download or preview videos, you need Microsoft Silverlight. Aside from the ongoing concerns about whether Silverlight violates patents overseas, let me point out that there is no Silverlight for Linux, and that is the platform that I and my friends use. In fact, Linux is the fastest-growing operating system around as it comes preinstalled on very popular computers such as the Asus EeePC.

So basically, the site is completely useless to me. And might I point out that the second biggest-growing operating system, Mac OS X, is also not supported. You’re certainly annoying a lot of people.

2. When you have a Windows PC and can download the videos, those videos have Digital Restrictions Management embedded in them. This means that customers can’t do ANYTHING with the videos except play them on their computers. They can’t put them onto portable devices, they can’t stream them to media-centre PCs, they can’t burn them to DVD for playback offline.

From what I’ve read, too, users have to install extra software to view their videos, and this software leeches off the user’s own internet connection to send the video to other people! Without warning! (oh, maybe in the fine-print of the EULA).  Malware uses its victims’ internet connections to try and make money for its creators - this software of yours apparantly does the same thing. It’s very poor behaviour of the national broadcaster.

In addition, you now have a dependence on third-party software that can be commanded to lock you and your customers out, for any reason that the third party cares to invent or use. Imagine angry customers who’ve bought TV shows off you, who can no longer watch them because you’re having a minor disagreement with the software provider! That’s a recipe for disaster, and I’m surprised you didn’t think of this scenario! It has happened before, and not only with video clips; I can think of an example where it happened with medical records.

Privacy. Your customers now have a third-party program on their computers, where the workings of it are not open for viewing. It already acts as malware, leeching off the customer’s internet connection; who’s to say that it’s not also acting as spyware? Does the ABC respect its viewers’ right to privacy?

This is such a *terrible* move by the ABC; I’m disappointed that I can’t personally buy my favourite shows without a 40km round trip to an ABC store, but I’m absolutely shocked that you’ve chosen this DRM-infested platform for distributing the video.

I have also forwarded this message to Senator Conroy, as his office could well be affected by the implications of the use of this software, and its exclusion of non-Windows users.

Yours sincerely,

Christopher Lees

First, a disclaimer: If you watch Doc Martin on Surf The Channel, let me assure you that I get no information about individual viewers.

I’ve noticed that my earlier Doc Martin episodes have had the most number of views, then it seems to go downhill from there. You could imagine that this is because the first episode has been on there the longest, but there’s literally a day or two seperating the uploading of the episodes. Curiously enough, around the end of the first series we see a larger jump in viewers. Wouldn’t everybody follow the order of the series? Maybe? You’d imagine so!

A more curious occurance is that people seem to change the channel; ONLINE! Look at these statistics:

S2E5 Part 1: 90 views
S2E5 Part 2: 69 views
S2E5 Part 3: 68 views
S2E5 Part 4: 67 views
S2E5 Part 5: 54 views

That’s twenty-one people who stopped watching during the first part, and 13 people who stopped watching during the 4th part.

The trend continues with the previous episode:

Part 1: 187 views
Part 2: 134 views
Part 3: 132 views
Part 4: 123 views
Part 5: 104 views

Eighty-odd people who started watching never finished watching. Considering that each part is between 9 and 10 minutes long (except the last part, roughly 7 minutes long), we can see approximately where people lose interest.

Isn’t that cool? I have information about viewing patterns that the producers of Doc Martin would probably love to have. In future I think I’ll enable statistics collection on the videos so I can see more information about the country of viewers, when they’re viewing, things like that. Once again, no personally-identifying data of course; but it would be interesting to see.

I’ve been reading on Ars.Technica a bunch of comments on the story that Psystar has hired some prominent anti-Apple lawyers.

Some of the anti-clone comments are ridiculous:

1. Apple hardware costs the same as PC hardware - Apple fanbois have been claiming this for 10 years and it’s still not true

2. There’s something special about the "integration" between OS and hardware

3. Clones will mean the "start" of Mac OS X viruses (how did they work out this one?)

4. Clones are like Daewoo being allowed to put BMW badges on their cars (this one mystifies me; Psystar is installing an Apple operating system on their machines, not putting Apple stickers on them)

But the one that annoyed me the most was "Apple nearly went under when they did Mac clones last time". Oh, it’s reasonably accurate, but they never mention the reason why Apple struggled against the clones.

The Mac clones were cheaper, faster, and more expandable.

Early Power Computing models were flaky, but toward the end the clones became more desirable computers than the Macs themselves.

If Psystar wins, or if we see a developing clone market, hopefully that should go some way to busting the first and second myths. Give the clone builders a few months, maybe a year, and they’ll have their machines purring like true leopards. The recession is the perfect opportunity to put cheap Mac clones into the marketplace.

I hope Psystar wins, because if for nothing else it will be a win for expandable computers. A computer with no upgradability is just tomorrow’s landfill.

It also occurs to me that if I want to start my own system builder business, I could market it in a similar way to Apple, and compete with Apple’s pricing (easy) rather than with Acer, Dell, HP or locally-built-computer pricing (much more difficult).

I’d like a new feature in Apt/dpkg where you can specify that updates from one particular repository should take precedence over updated packages in other repos.

If this feature was available, I would use it to make sure that the only updates available for ffmpeg are from the Medibuntu repository. There was an updated version of ffmpeg put into the Ubuntu Gutsy repo to fix a security issue, which I immediately installed because it seemed harmless enough. But I didn’t really realise it was from Ubuntu and not from Medibuntu, and it ended off breaking support for certain file formats that are really useful to me… like DVD video!

I cursed Kdenlive for a few minutes before I figured out the problem, and forced the Medibuntu version of those packages. But every time after you "force" an older version, even straight after installing it, it still wants to upgrade to the latest. You have to Lock Package in order to stop it. But that also prevents updates from Medibuntu, which I certainly don’t want it to do.

Ubuntu guys, please stop breaking ffmpeg, or I’ll be forced to compile and maintain my own copy from cvs. Which I don’t think should be necessary for a desktop distro. Or, Linux Mint has the whole "problematic Apt updates" problem licked - maybe a change of distribution is in order.

Sorry about that last post, I just had something to get off my chest. I guess by now you know what that was

My cat Molly didn’t eat much last night, and didn’t eat anything tonight. Maybe she’s worried about my Dad, who’s just away over East, because he’s usually the one who feeds her. Maybe she thinks something’s happened to him.

One of my friends-who-is-a-girl posted some pictures of some shirts she bought, on her blog. The trouble is, she’s was wearing the shirts at the time, and she’s quite a busty girl, so basically I’ve got pictures of her very-watchable chest.

Heh.

Surf The Channel still hasn’t accepted the 10th episode of Doc Martin, so I’ll try putting up the 11th ep.

I’ve also been thinking that, what with work, it’s going to be impossible for me to not watch a single second of Olympics coverage. I’m thinking that I should set boundaries, like "TVs can cross through my field of vision, and I can watch the picture to evaluate whether a TV has picked up the station correctly, but I cannot stand and watch an event for the purposes of satisfying curiosity, or for the purpose of entertainment".

This is one time when I’m not going to hold my tongue.

If your wife disapproved of the fact that you bought an air-conditioner, then you should have admitted your mistake and asked for a refund. We wouldn’t have given you one, but we would have offered store credit that you could use to buy your wife a nice present to apologise.

Claiming that I mislead you in any way regarding cashbacks from suppliers is MORALLY WRONG. You knew all along that you got a prepaid Visa card from Fujitsu, because I told you. I tell everyone. You know that the card doesn’t cost you anything to have; I told you that you can just go to an ATM and get the value of the card out. I offered to show you the information from Fujitsu’s brochure for your own piece of mind.

We both know what I said and what I did.

We also both know that you didn’t write any letters to us in May, because if you had, you wouldn’t have waited until my phone call in late July to suddenly demand a refund. We also know that your claim that you were recording our last conversation was utter bollocks. I wasn’t born yesterday, I know a bluff when I hear one.

The only thing you probably don’t know is that my name isn’t Lee, but I’ll forgive you that.

Writing a letter of complaint about me to my boss was a VERY unethical thing for you to do. I could have got into trouble for this. I could have been forced to pay your $200 deposit back to you (out of my own money) all because you got cold feet. Heck, I could’ve potentially lost my job over this, and I’d have buckley’s of getting another job what with the recession.

I have only once given a consumer the wrong information, and that was by mistake when I was just starting out in the electrical business. I’ll admit that I’ve sometimes pushed products that ended off being absolute crap, and I’ve apologised to those customers for it. But I’ve never mislead anyone, and especially not you.

I pride myself on providing good service, and I’ve had several people writing to thank me for serving them. So your letters (the supposedly-22-May typed letter and the scratchy handwritten one, both recieved today) have put a blemish on my record. Everybody involved knows that I did nothing wrong, but you’re taking the bastard’s way out, kicking my neck because I’m the most convenient scapegoat. I wonder how you can sleep at night. I actually suspect that nobody can be that mean willingly, and that maybe you suffer from a mental illness that causes you to believe what you say.

Next time, think about the possible consequences of your actions.

Oh, I’m sure you’ll get your $200 deposit back, but you’ve lost more than that in karma.

Yours sincerely,

"Lee" (not my real name)
An electrical store salesperson.