Fri, 27 Jan 2006

AIM culture and interruptions

I have a failrly large buddy list now, both from Google chat and AIM. Most people use AIM because it's...owned by AOL? I don't really know. but anyway, I do too and I use it for a lot of work related discussion. I've noticed a particular type of person who appears to have some kind of "online notification" or "buddy pounce" feature to their AIM client because every single time I leave "away" status or come online, within moments I get a "hey" or a "yo". I like talking to these people but I find it extremely odd that I come to expect a feeling of hesitation when I open my IM client, thinking to myself, "do I really want to pay attention to this person right this moment, because I will have to."

posted at: 11:29 | path: /pop | permanent link to this entry

Packaging Asterisk for Debian

Building sarge backports from sid for asterisk was easy:
echo "deb http://ash.97montrose.org/packages/ binary/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

However, finding MySQL support was not. I'll be building a backport of asterisk-addons 1.2.1 for sarge soon. I've built a .deb for asterisk-addons-1.2.1. It's in the repo. It appears no one else has done this very publicly. Maybe I'll get in trouble with the man?

posted at: 01:54 | path: /voip | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 26 Jan 2006

Using the Kodak EasyShare C360 with Debian

I got this camera for christmas. It's a Kodak EasyShare C360. At first glance I was estatic because it has very good specs, is small and has a real zoom lens. Then I opened the box and saw all the Windows driver installation instructions. I got freaked out because I was used to a digital camera being nothing more than a USB mass storage device. After a few hours of reading I discovered Kodak invented the PTP protocol, which this camera speaks and the gphoto2 library can read data from any device that speaks PTP. Though it was strange that my camera wasn't listed in the gphoto2 supported devices. Being scared of the unknown, I installed the gtkam application from sarge and ran it. It detected the camera and showed me thumbnails! cool. Then it gave a PTP I/O error and segfaulted. Not cool. I felt defeated. Nothing online mentioned this camera working with Debian and no constructuve advice from other distros either.

Then it hit me...gphoto2 is a command line application. Let's skip the GUI. A little man page reading and I came up with these two commands:

gphoto2 --auto-detect
gphoto2 -P

and all my photos on the camera were downloaded to the current directory! No probs, I got photos! Stay tuned for the new photo enhanced version of Uncompatible Systems.

posted at: 22:56 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

CARP installation, first notes.

CARP is failing over correctly on the two Soekris NET4801 boxes running OpenBSD 3.8-stable. Unplugging a cable that belongs to each virtual IP does not stop pings from responding. I'm going to install pfsync next.

posted at: 15:09 | path: /openbsd | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 25 Jan 2006

The Perry Bible Fellowship

If you are feeling down, check out this comic called The Perry Bible Fellowship and it'll lift you up!

posted at: 09:46 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 20 Jan 2006

My Duck Family Tree

Ever wonder about the lineage of Donald Duck? Not, like, the history of the animators who drew him and his family. Like, his family for real? Now you know, and that's like, power n'shit.

posted at: 17:37 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Bling or Blong?

I gave my musical buddy 31d1, some of my bling. He is eternally grateful. In the process of our IM conversation, I accidently called it blong, thus coining a term for fake, cubic zirconia bling.

posted at: 13:04 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Hipster Radio. Unfortunate Title, Good Music.

It's amazing how some things fall under the radar. Joe at hipster.org is one of them. He appears to be religiously broadcasting his collection of mp3s, 24/7 without fail. Sweet.

posted at: 12:56 | path: /radio | permanent link to this entry

How Much Do I Pay For My Addiction to Free Software?

I go on and on about the virtues of Free Software and GNU/Linux to my friends. They think I'm silly or geeky or brilliant or boring for it. Very few think I'm brilliant, very...few. It doesn't help to be friends with audio geeks and writers, who have a seemingly natural inclination to the glowing white Apple. So now that I have been using Debian GNU/Linux for about a year straight without working on a commercial OS (Windows XP) at home for anything more than playing games I pick up at Best Buy, I thought I'd figure out how much I really am paying for my OS of choice when I factor everything together. Then I will compare it to how much my friends are paying with their hardware and warzed software they didn't pay for. I love my friends, I really do...

First comes hardware I own:

The total is: $1250.

I should note that I live in New York City and carry a screwdriver around with me at all times. This is only a small amount of working hardware I find in the trash. I have been collecting CRT monitors for a while. No one wants them anymore. They are the most popular trash item I find. And now software.

The total is $210/year

The applications in Debian give me 99% of what I need to do anything I can think of. The remaining 1% comes from backports or custom builds of source code not in Debian. m0n0wall is an excellent firewall/router/VPN/traffic shaper/wireless AP/etc/etc. I do like playing games, Weaning myself off the Microsoft addiction to be up to date on the latest games is going well with Cedega. Although the Free Software Foundation is not necessarily a software development group, they do good things to protect my rights to use my software, so I like to support them with donations. And finally, Internet connectivity services.

The total is roughly $2750/year considering my limited usage on outgoing VoIP minutes

So service is the most expensive investment I have made both for work and for recreation. Most, if not all of these services are also using Free Software to power their equipment that gives me service.

I won't take the laundry list approach for the comparison. I'll just ramble on some more. If you actually read the list above you can tell that I have a much higher computer addiction than your average yahoo/gmail web browsing folk. I even have more than your average dedicated blogger or Apple congregation member. But let's take an example scenario from what I consider an average professional's computer rig. As I mentioned before, I do work with audio geeks so I'm including some media production stuff here.

The first necessity is the Apple laptop. Everyone knows iBooks are for kids, so you have to get a G4 PowerBook. That lands anywhere between $2200 and $3000 for one computer. A laptop usually isn't perfect. It's nice to have a desktop at home, especially if you are doing audio production. There are some very cheap PC desktops out there but they all have Windows XP Home installed and are quite under powered to make running that OS pleasant, especially with lots of big commercial applications. So you have to go with a more pricey model, which will run you anywhere from $1500 - $3000.

For doing media production, Digidesign Pro Tools is the market leader but it is very high priced and the low end models come with a crippled version of the software. Let's say you'll start at around $450 for the whole package on the low end and go up to about $2000 for the high end. And that's just for the audio interface and crippled software.

Those that "do Mac" get to drop much more cash on the desktop. A G5 starts at $1999 but that's in ridiculous shape to perform well with OS X. Consider between $2500 and $5000.

For firewall/routing, there is the venerable Linksys WRT54G, which is hella cheap and pretty damn cool. But it doesn't do VPN. If you need that, the cheapest product is the SonicWall SOHO with a limited user licence. That starts at around $300.

And finally the issue of commercial software. No one I know pays for any of their software, at all, ever...even if the copyright holders demand it by law. Unfortunately, the process of obtaining that software can be longer and more frusturating than figuring out a free alternative. It also produces a strange version mentality where people are afraid to upgrade because they will loose their cracks and have to find new ones. I recently ran into someone who was still running MacOS 9.2 because all her cracked Pro Tools plugins wouldn't run on OS X. That's dedication!

But this fight is getting boring but part of me did it just to get it on paper. I actually didn't know if I was dropping too much cash on hardware or getting played on the Free Software addiction. But now I feel like I made a good decision. It may be hard to get the photos off the digital camera among other hardware quirks, but in the end I'm spending less time worrying about my computer and more time using it.

Peace out!

posted at: 02:29 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 18 Jan 2006

Fascism in America, Part I

This page from wikipedia got me interested in researching the history of Fascism in America. It appears that there was a popular movement for a Fascist coup d'etas on the federal government after The Great Depression. Military force was required to defend against it.

posted at: 13:08 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 17 Jan 2006

Cash Moves Everything Around Me, C.R.E.A.M, It's The Money...

I made my own bling in the Gimp. Luke Gattuso taught me. The tutorial is written for Adobe Photoshop but if you're clever like me you can use the Gimp from Debian GNU/Linux.

posted at: 20:11 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 14 Jan 2006

Steve Jobs Still Believes In What He Does

And he's grand-fucking-eloquent about it. He gave a comencement speech at Stanford about following your dream and not finishing college.

posted at: 02:11 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Your news is nothing, bitch!

Setphen Colbert ist die bomb. He actually got an AP news wire item about his fictional news show's fictionaly non-fictional content. Fiction in non-fiction!? WTF!

posted at: 02:01 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 12 Jan 2006

MIT Media Lab I/O Brush

Pick up a photographic image or a real object and paint with it on a special touch screen. It's the I/O Brush!. Check the movie at the bottom.

posted at: 15:00 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 11 Jan 2006

X.org 6.9 from backports.org

I got this ATI Radeon 9500 Pro and I thought I'd be all phatty gamer now. Instead, I'm going through the common process of digging up alternative X configurations to that in Debian. Reading through the changelog for x.org 6.9/7.0 one would think that DRI support would work on cards with the r300 chipset, as there are plenty of mentions about that chipset. Wrong. It doesn't. 2D support, no problem. 3D accelleration for rocking Cedega with all those Windows games. No fucking way. So back to square one. Removing the x.org backport was fairly complicated and involved temporarly breaking the package manager. Re installing XFree86 wasn't hard at all.

Now I'm just following the instructions from the Debian Wiki and installing unofficial binary packages built for sarge and XFree 4.3

posted at: 22:12 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 05 Jan 2006

XFree86 FAQ

X used to scare me. I remember how cool it was to read Mac World or some stupid PC magazine and feel all smart about how to do GUI tricks when I was using commmercial OSes. Switching to Linux and using X felt all old skool and entirely uncool without some bloatware like Gnome or KDE installed. Well, well, I was wrong. X can do crazy shit with nothing more than a tiny window manager and some good reference. See you later lame GUI!

BTW, my current GUI tower of power is fluxbox + mrxvt + fbpager. I adjusted the ~/.fluxbox/keys file to open apps and emulate some Gnome shortcuts I got accoustomed to. The whole window manager installation (not including X) is around a meg and runs fine on a Pentium II.

posted at: 15:52 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

About

I work with communications, open source software, sound and video. I'm the most happy when I work on all of these things at once. Sounds, Systems, Robots, Rocking Tigers.

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