I rebooted into Ubuntu to try to fiddle with WiFi again.  Couldn’t get it to work.  “So,” I thought, “I’ll go back to Windows 7, research, get any files/drivers I may need, then reboot into Ubuntu, copy the stuff from the NTFS partition, and I’m good to go!”

Um, no.  A Facebook-distributed virus bricked my Windows installation.  Hardcore.  I’m almost certain, upon research, that this was the cause.  “So, OK,” I thought.  “I’ll go to the library, do the research there, burn any files I might need onto a CD-R, and go home and do the Ubuntu thing that way.”  That wouldn’t fix the Windows problem, but, as I wrote (poetically) before, “Fuck Windows!”

Um, no.  I found what I needed, yes.  I burned it onto a CD-R, yes.  I brought it home, yes.  But my notebook doesn’t ship with an optical drive and my external drive — well, doesn’t work.  At all.  Ubuntu can’t see it, the BIOS can’t see it.  I feel lucky that I can see it.  It’s black and opaque, so that helps.

So I used F8 to boot into the Windows restore partition to try to repair, and:

Um, no.  The “repair” failed.  I think this is because I resized the partition.  So the only option was to rewrite the Windows partition (fortunately I can do that rather than wipe the whole disk).  So I started it going, glancing at it occasionally, and then decided to — um, go build Rome.  WTF?  The reinstallation took approximately 14 of the nine hours.  In the last stages, the Toshiba and Best Buy software was installed, which, frankly, is a metric ton of malware.  OMFG.  It interrupts one’s work, spies on the user, reports stuff to who-knows-whom.  But I got it going again, after the so-many hours.

But, of course (“of course”?) my MBR had been rewritten by the reinstallation.  So I can’t load Ubuntu any longer.

But, OK, that’s cool!  Now all I have to do is download a Karmic USB live image and boot off that!

Um, no.  Can’t find my frakking USB key, the reason for which is likely related to what I plan to be the next post.  The one avec much hilarity.

So I went looking for a way to reinstall GRUB or lilo from Windows.  This is: well, somewhere between “I haven’t figured out how to do it” and “Fucking impossible”.  I’m leaning towards the latter, as all of the utilities I’ve found are x86, and I’m in 64-bit Windows. 

So (another “so”) I’m going to try to do it through Wubi, which I have essentially-zero confidence will work.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: I may disappear.  For a long time.  Especially if Windows gets hosed again.  And the cheapest fix may be to go buy another USB key tomorrow.  And a big part of this problem — not all, but much — is a virus.  Infecting Windows 7.  Distributed via Facebook.  #FAIL

Please email me any luck you may have lying about.  Not that I’m guaranteed to be able to check my email in finite time.

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

My first website went online.

No shit.  July 1995.  Crazy, huh?

Free bananas through the mail for life for anyone who can find an archived copy of that site somewhere.

Information Theorist Two:  “What?  Tell me!”

Information Theorist One:  “‘Heads’”

Also, unless I throttle the 2.13GHz CPU speed back to 1.33GHz or lower, the laptop will most of the time overheat, triggering an auto shutdown.

Could these be related?  (Can you tell I’m not a double-E?)

You may need to run the program with root privileges

LAME 3.98.2 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), SSE (ASM used), SSE2
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 17249 Hz - 17782 Hz
Encoding pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav to pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III VBR(q=4)
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA
  3500/10289  (34%)|    0:05/    0:15|    0:06/    0:19|   16.994x|    0:12
192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************
224 [  11] %
256 [   7] %
320 [   1] %
----------------------------------------------02:57---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  192.3       12.1  87.9        95.9   2.1   2.0

Specifically regarding this:

192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************

What does the ratio of % to * mean?  It shifts around as the encoding progresses.  Is it something like “placeholder for 100″ or something?

1. Print the document as a PostScript file

Open up whatever program you want to print from: oowriter, acroread, evince, firefox, gedit, whatever.  Go to File→Print (or equivalent), select “Print to file”, choose “PS” as the format, give it a filename (I’ll assume you choose “document.ps”), make a note of the directory you’re printing it to, and click “Print”.

2. Get the PostScript utilities and viewer you need

In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install psutils evince

3. Rearrange the pages in booklet order

psbook document.ps document.signature.ps

4. Render the files “2-up”

psnup -l -pletter -2 -s.65 document.signature.ps > document.2up.ps

Option #1: Your printer prints double-sided

Just open document.2up.ps in evince (evince document.2up.ps) and print it.

Option #2: Your printer does not print double-sided

pstops "2:0(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > odd.ps
pstops "2:-1(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > even.ps
evince even.ps odd.ps

Print odd.ps, flip the pages over, then print even.ps (Keep track of how your printer flips your paper.  The direction the top edge is facing will stay the same, but you may have to load the pages face-up the second time, or maybe face-down.  Tip: make a small mark with a pencil on the top surface of the top page in the paper tray.  After printing, look at the page you put your mark on.  Is the text on the side with the pencil mark?  Load the pages face-down for the second pass.  Is it on the bottom?  The pages get flipped internally, so load your pages face-up.)

http://www.mcgees.org/?p=1885 Having gotten a humorous wrong-word error in a text message spelled out with a cellular phone number pad, I started to wonder about collisions of this sort in general.  What keystrokes match the most words?

Well, I turned to my trusty bigwordlist.txt, a big dictionary file I pieced together from multiple places, particularly orchy, and I wrote a Perl script to look at it.

If a phone were to have this dictionary (there are a lot of reasons it shouldn’t, mostly because a lot of the words are of much lower frequency than others) there would be more than 20,000 collisions — places where the phone would have to guess, whether by a stupid algorithm (“pick the lowest alphabetically”, say) or something more sophisticated (“rank by frequency of occurrence in the wild”) or something very sophisticated that took grammar into account.

Here are some facts I found:

* The most troublesome sequence is 2666.  That can stand for ammo, amon, anno, anon, bonn, bono, boom, boon, cmon, comm, como, comp, conn, coom, coon, or coop (16 possibilities).
* The most collisions for two-, three-, and five-letter words are for 66, 466, and 46637 with 13 possibilities each (that “66″ — “[mno][mno]” — shows up a lot, yes?)
* My mom’s allergic to shrimp, so would that make them a “non-mom-nom”?  Spell it out.
* A lot of long medical words collide, because the ending “-ia” is the same as “-ic” in T9 (“hypercholesterolemia”, “hypercholesterolemic”).  Below that, “-ser” and “-ses” and “-zer” and “-zes” in verbs cause a lot of collisions.  The longest not-trivial pair looks to be “unreasonableness” and “unseasonableness” at 16 letters, but I’m not sure those are standard usages.
* Any requests for more info?  Raw files?

I found this lovely solution using rsync.  It’s worth reading the whole page if you don’t know how hard links work in *nix, but basically the solution has four backup slots, which get moved by one in the queue every backup, and if the files haven’t changed across all four, there’s only one copy of the files, because everything is done with ln.  And the most recent backup is always the full backup, which is ridiculously cool.

Here’s the whole thing:

rm -rf backup.3
mv backup.2 backup.3
mv backup.1 backup.2
cp -al backup.0 backup.1
rsync -a --delete source_directory/  backup.0/

Careful with the trailing slashes: include them where included, omit them where omitted.  The “backup.2″ would really look like “/media/disk/backup/backup.2″ or whatever, and “source_directory/” would really look like “/home/you/”, but you can fill those in.

I put those five lines in a script called backup.sh, chmodded it +x, and put the following line in my crontab:

00 04 * * * /home/joshua/bin/backup.sh

And — yeah — that’s it.  Awesome.  Now all I need is a second, larger hard drive to backup the first backup drive.  (“Big fleas … little fleas … ad infinitum“)

Now here comes translationparty.com, doing one thing and doing it well: in and out of Japanese (always a fun language for translators) until equilibrium is reached.

I was ecstatic when I found a stable oscillator (order 2), but it turns out those are quite common (even if the site doesn’t recognize that it’s stable at order > 1.)  Then I found an order 4!  A→B→C→D→A.  Here it is, with thanks to Eddie Izzard.

OK!  Beat that!  Game on!

(No one is going to play, is he?  Then I will be very   )

I loathe Microsoft Windows.  I haven’t used it in years, using instead one version of Linux or another, and Ubuntu is nice enough to spread on toast.  Also, I love free-as-in-speech software and hate DRM and spyware.  But Macs have this bizarre ability to “just work” when you try to do things, in the way that Google “just works”, and that’s a tune gets stuck in one’s head.  And they usedappropriated the Linux kernel, so there is no forgivable reason that what I’m about request shouldn’t be possible.  Maybe — just maybe — a Mac is like one of those yummy Victorian writing desks where cool stuff (such as pages of young adult adventure fiction) happens when you hold a lever down and push somewhere else.  Or maybe they’re like a Furby, and if you scalp it there’s wickedly-cool stuff underneath.  Or maybe it’s like a Ferrari that’s delivered to the customer with the engine compartment welded shut, and another welding torch (?) would let you do something like — um — bore out cylinders (?) — don’t really know what Im talking about.

So: A largish minority of my readers are Mac users (if Google Analytics is to be believed) and a statistically-significant percentage are techie guys (if comments are to be believed).  Is there overlap?  Huddle together and evangelize — y’allz groupies are into that shit, right? — or, if you’re Marcus, give me an appointment at the Apple Store and sell me one.

Whatever you want to say, Say.  It.  Here.  I don’t want to collate Facebook, email, and Twitter kthx.

What I absolutely need:

1. Hard-core access to a command line (found this already!)
2. A full platter of indispensable command-line goodies (named pipes, STERR redirection, various awks/seds/whatever; egrep, sort, wc, uniq, and all the other stuff that makes computing worth doing in the first place.
3. PERL.  In bold: PERL, with full access to a debugger.
4. emacs; cron; sendmail; whatever I’m forgetting
5. The ability to completely ditch Finder in favor of something that doesn’t blow gangrenous goats.
6. The ability to customize keyboard shortcuts as arbitrarily convoluted as I need, and remap any — any — exiting ones
7. Full access to ps that will hide nothing from me and full access to kill that the OS will not override.
8. The ability to add arbitrary DRM-free media to the drive without complaint, tagging, or tattling.
9. Access to a proper, free package repository and a fully-featured package manager (I.  Don’t.  Care.  Which.  Just something.)
10. The ability to add software that Apple really doesn’t want you to use, such as aircrack and john, with, again, no tattling

Second tier:

1. ability to be a SAMBA client or server
2. ability to play DVDs regardless of region, and, ideally, to strip or bypass PUAs (running DVD Decrypter in an emulation mode or VM would work, which leads me to …)
3. emulation mode or VMs at least as good as wine
4. some way of upgrading these toy keyboards.  No, sorry, that’s mean to toy keyboards.  Toy keyboards at Target have greater key travel and less rattle.  Ideally I’d like some kind of fancy piano-hammer-type “breaking” keys (pressure/Pressure/PRESSURE/PRESSURE/snap!) but it’s not a deal-killer

And tertiar(il?)y?

1. Ability to fold into a tablet that I can prop up on the table and use a Twiddler to type with

Oh, wait, I think I meant kinda like a plastic toy with fewer keyboard shortcuts, but, still, THANKS MOM!

Diss diss diss Mac Mac Mac.  I know, I know.  Here it is in two sentences: “Everything the designers thought you should do is trivially easy.  Everything they didn’t want you to do is completely fucking impossible.”  If it’s a choice between “makes the easy stuff easy, the hard stuff impossible, and everything uniformly pretty” and “makes the easy stuff possible, the hard stuff possible, and every UI look like a different mongrel dog”, please sign me up for the latter.  Except — most of the easy stuff is easy now in Ubuntu, and it’s getting more handsome.

Anyway — I may not respond quickly to your attempts at contact.  But I love you anyway.  Some of you.  You know who you are.

So, in the same spirit and same lack-of-tact: I don’t recommend you use a Mac, nor recommend you upgrade to “Mac OS X Snow Leopard” (WTFIU with that name?), but if you do, and want to preorder, doest though through me and I’ll get an 8.5% kickback.

I cannot comment on the Windows version, but the Linux version has a command-line interface with a lot of options.  So I wrote three wrappers, called, respectively, mespeak, mespeakf, and mespeaku.

mespeak, to be used as mespeak "some text":

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp "$1" --stdout | aplay

mespeakf, to be used as mespeak file:

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp -f $1 --stdout | aplay

mespeaku, to read a webpage as mespeak http://www.website.com:

lynx --dump $1 | sed 's/\[[^\]*]//g'| mespeak --stdin

So sorry about the sed script.  It becomes rather write-only when one is matching against literal brackets.

Your patience is appreciated or, failing that, please resend urgent messages if I didn’t respond the first time.

Who the hell would want to smell like snow when Weird Fragrances exists?

Presumably for the Jones Soda crowd, you can smell like, well, simply weird shit.  Like burning rubber.  Or crisp banknotes.  Magazines.  Fireworks smoke or (aargh) an ashtray.  As of now, you can request a free sample.

Oh, and if anyone remembers the details on that public radio segment, or the book the interviewee wrote, let me know.

Update: This may just be a spam trap.  I have received huge amounts of spam to an email address used only to register on this site.  I haven’t checked my mail yet, so I don’t know if the free samples exist or not.

No, I’m not in Ubuntu yet.  I still have to [illegal] a bit more.  So, a parting thought: I’m giving up some stuff in fleeing Redmond.  Like any abusive relationship, it wasn’t all bad.  There are some things I’ll miss.

Three, actually.  Homebase; Quicken; and Windows-Tab.

Windows-Tab is Irene-Jacob-sexy.  Damn.  It is the coolest fucking thing in the world.  If there is not a KDE clone of it, I’m going to have to write one.  It would be good to keep my coding neurons busy, anyway.  Do they even document this?  Are you on Vista (you poor sod)?  Hold down the Windows key (which has euphemistic names in other PC OSs), and hit Tab.  Oh.  My.  God.

Why isn’t a Quicken replacement available on *nix?  I don’t know.  Maybe nerds don’t want to admit that they can’t figure out double-entry accounting to a sufficient degree to use GnuCash.  And a substitute for Homebase?  Robby’s doing an unbelievable job with Tellico, and he’s even incorporated some of my code as well as written an export template geared towards booksellers at my request (not sure which shows greater benevolence.)  But Win-Tab?  It’s not going to displace Katee — but it might well show up in my dreams.  I can’t wait.

Then came laptops.  These were just about the right size for a the top of a desk.

Then notebook computers.  These were almost small enough to fit on your lap.

Then there were handhelds.  Handhelds were about the size of your average paper notebook, just heavier.

So when computers were finally shrunken to a size you could accommodate in two hands, they were palmtops.

Like the article at that site (with which I’m unaffiliated)?  Not to belabor anything, but if you do, click some of the ads.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

The solution: clear your cookies.  Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear Now -> (Just “Cookies”) -> Clear Private Data Now.

I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

Favicon Picker to the rescue, replacing the works-only-occasionally functionality to add icons to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you are a superpowered user, you can get by on just icons.  So far, I need a little text prod, both as a reminder and as a slightly larger mouseover target.

Here’s mine, for now.  Hope you are inspired.

(A muffin to the person who figures out the largest number of the URLs corresponding to the cryptic icons and tags in my toolbar!)

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

If you don’t know much about traceroute, read about it.  It’s a tool that needs to be in your arsenal, for everything from satisfying curiosity to diagnosing network failures to tracking down spammers.  You don’t need to be a poweruser to make use of it.

On M$ Windows, for historical (8.3) reasons, it’s called tracert, apparently, or maybe pathping.

I gave you the StumbleUpon “wrapper” page.  As discussed in 2006, it’s a system worth using.