Subterfuge

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The I in the McPlace

March 7, 2010 in Subterfuge | No comments

I’m not a Apple fanbois. I gave away a third generation ipod touch to a office colleague. I have a 160gb ipod classic which never is even used. So what apple device will I use? I will use my older ipod video on occasion when I am not using my Archos that is Android powered. I bought the ipod classic in Chennai because my older 60g ipod video died and they had no older models. But it sucketh. It wants to be managed by iTunes. I don’t run either of the OS’es that support that piece of crap by choice. But I can use GTKPod with it. So now I can manage it. What sucketh next? It wants to write everything to its proprietary database. MP3 files become abdqfc.mp3. What da hell is that? Why do they do that? On my 80g ipod video running Rockbox; the file names are all there. The ipod is simply a USB storage device on Ubuntu so I can rsync to it.

Then the 3d generation touch… I had it for 2 days or so. I reset it numerous times. 100k applications but all through one place. Buh bye. Now I am down to my ARchos 5 android device and the rockbox’ed video. The Archos is decent. It plays all my mp3s, stores my photos, and has enough room left over to have movies on it. How do you add music to it? Easiest way on Ubuntu is to rsync music to it or just copy and paste or whatever. Its a simple usb disk drive when you need it to be. That’s not to say that my Archos is perfect. It has its Android moments. Sometimes it gets confused when I tap too quickly. I am learning to be patient with it. I like having everything on one thing though and it runs Linux.

So what do I prefer? The database thing or the simple USB disk drive thing? Seems to me the easiest way to add stuff is when its a USB drive. Linux does things real well in that mode. Plug it in, it mounts. Copy stuff to it or from it. Music comes off clean. No strange db-cursed titles. I still wonder why Apple in their supposed media superiority did things that way. I guess to again lock us mere mortals down to using only their devices with our music that we rent from iTunes. I won’t get started with iTunes though because it took me almost 6 months to get away from it, de-DRM my music, and shift my music purchasing to amazonmp3.com.

I always wonder why MAC users prefer the arguably insane iTunes interface to their world; yet they all complain about Microsoft Outlook or entourage. You’d figure they’d grok Outlook completely after using iTunes for so long. Honestly, the two are not that dis-similar. For me, I don’t use some dedicated application to manage my music besides rsync, a command line, and a simple script.

As I said going into this; I am not a fanbois. No iPad for me in April. No MAC laptop. No i-anything if I can help it. I’ll stick with 3 to 5 year old thinkpad T60 laptops that cost $500.00 US which will take Windows 7 or Ubuntu Karmic in minutes. I’ll also just go ahead and keep my decidedly inferior Android devices which are just USB Drives.

The AnythingbutItunes Experience

December 28, 2009 in Subterfuge | No comments

There already is a site called Anything But Ipod now we need a site for anything but iTunes.  First we need a media server which does not do the serving the brain dead way of iTunes. Firefly Media Server works with a variety of clients unlike the brain dead iTunes method that locks people out of the share unless running iTunes. What’s up with that? How can that possibly be “sharing”?

Now we need some clients.  Here are a few interesting media players:

Songbird – This one has come a long way on Linux. When I first tried it it would lock up my debian system solid. Now it works,

VLC Media Player – You gotta check this one! Works across the board very reliably. its industrial strength and a lot of people use it on a variety of platforms.

aTunes – I have not checked this one out yet; but it fills the bill because it can install on multiple platforms too. Let me know whatcha think if you use it.

XBMC – Finally, how about this one? Not tried it yet either; but it appears interesting and alive as well :-)

Friends don’t let friends use iTunes. Its evil and it steals your music and soul. Become a discerning user and make a choice. Don’t let the iKingdom dictate to you just because you have a MAC that iTunes is the place. It ain’t and never will be.

Its a good time to be…

December 21, 2009 in Subterfuge | 2 comments

A little green robot with twin spikes on the head

Even my saved blogsearch says so :-)

My Moto Milestone testing and play is going well. I go between it and my HTC Hero but the Droid has some features which make it hard to beat. Now I want root on this bad little puppy.

Geeks know best

November 30, 2009 in Subterfuge | No comments

I was reading Dave’s blogpost on what to get geeks for Xmas this year. I’ve been victimized in the past by well meaning gifters who think I really want sweaters or small toys that they think are geeky. Family members seems particularly afflicted at pretending to understand what I may need or want. Back when I was an archeologist, everyone seemed to think I needed coffee cups or t-shirts that said catchy euphemisms like:

Archeologists do it in the dirt
My Life is in Ruins
Archeologists are the Cowboys of Science

Now I’ve used a few of those in the past in blogposts; but that’s a mite different than assuming I would have wanted a coffee cup.

I’m not sure I am really a geek. I think I am more of a tool user, habilis person. But there are a few things I’d add and, in my case, correct from Dave’s post. I don’t really want clothing or t-shirts. God knows I have enough shirts and it seems that the shirts that everyone buys are not the ones I want. Why do you think I would really want a collared dress shirt with a penguin on the back, dear family-in-law member? It looks like a fooking bowling shirt. All I need are the shoes and I can get in that Thursday night league. Second, don’t think I want books. The books you buy me are not the ones I will end up reading. I don’t read geeky technology books whatsoever. I end up reading historical fiction and other literature. I can read a man page but I don’t need a book of them. Finally, and here is the golden rule. Don’t buy me a damned thing!

Just send me the money or good thoughts and wishes. I’ll do the buying for myself. I can screw up my hardware just as well as you can so I don’t need your well meaning incompatible system memory or that celeron motherboard that you think is top of the line :)

Christmas to me is getting that one last sweater that someone really thinks I need and then trying desperately to figure out where to hide it so when they come to visit and inevitably ask; I can say innocently-

Oh that! I have that and just wore it yesterday in fact.

Then my family members look at me with that look I know so well. You are going to Hell for telling fibbarooskies.

Too Many ROMs; not enough time

November 3, 2009 in Ideas, Subterfuge | No comments

I tend to spend time over on XDA-Developers Sapphire forum these days peering at the new chef creations of ROMs. I’m now running the Case_ 1.1 ROM which is very stable and has to be the fastest yet. These android phones are really fun to go hack against. You can enable swap on them, make them overclock, install new kernels, make them do strange and wonderful things. This whole platform is exciting and I’m sorry for all the poor iPhone users who are locked into one interface, one way, one firmware. I think Android is the wave of the future for phones and sooner or later the phones will converge but I happen to think that Android will host that convergence. It has forward momentum, developer communities, new and exciting cooking creations that the ROM chefs bring us, and the market applications are edging up there.

The phone is fun to use as a phone and the HTC Magic 32A with its distinctive “chin” is a fun phone to just use. Having an unlocked phone and not being dependent on “some service provider” really frees one from the usual restrictions like on ATT or name that network.com. I bought a SIM Card in Singapore I use and I have a post-paid card here in Chennai. I also have one for the US on ATT which was a really good deal. I don’t get charged for non-use and the number is good. Adding a nominal data plan is easy too. I swear to never go back to a locked down phone ever again. I was kinda tempted to get a ATT phone but they ignore Android so forget it.

If you remember here, I actually tried to co-exist with a Ipod touch 64gb. Truth be told, there are lots of nice applications for it. I just don’t have a good feeling about using it so I gave it away. iTunes particularly annoys me. It interferes with what I want to do with my music and photo’s. It is the outlook of digital media. It wants to be everything and it does only a little well and the rest it sucks at. But for those with the iPhone or whatever, its the game. Blech. No choice there.

More phones are rolling out this year and next with Android on them. More portable media devices, more tablets, laptops like the Acer which dual boot. This creates a platform that is vibrant and alive and that invites competition between the major makers of the phones. Thanks a lot to the pioneers like HTC and T-Mobile though. Lets be honest, every movement of consequence whether social, cultural, or technological needs a pioneer. Then it needs an early adopter. Then it needs legions of early adopters willing to brick a phone, try something untested.

Its that way with Linux too. Linux is forever unfinished so I have to laugh when someone used to say on the Debian mailing list when a “release” would be done. The answer is really “never”. Testing never gets done. It turns to stable but it goes on. That also creates a wonderful world of applications, change, user adoption.

Poor old Windows with its staid and non changing environment with locked down this and that. No wonder its the has been platform that’s only really suited for VMware environments. The old adage in anthropology “there is nothing so constant as change” applies to our phones, technologies, social, and cultural environments too. Our devices that inter-connect us are part of the overall fabric of our environments.

What do you want to use anyways? Something that Apple decides what it should look like, when its done, how to use it, and how much to pay (hint: pay a lot!). Or be an early adopter, a steward of open use and change. Put that iPhone on the social railroad tracks and let the train of change roll it over. Its so yesterday.

Heading out to Washington, DC

July 7, 2007 in Events, Linux, Subterfuge | No comments

Starting on Monday, I’m in travel mode. Heading out to work with our east coast support and sales team in Washington DC. The weather there sounds kinda interesting (humid). I’ve worked a great deal with these guys via phone and Cisco MeetingPlace which is like WebEX; but the trip is great because I also get to meet up with our east coast application architects and the Help Desk management staff.

I’ll be adding a bit to the blog while in travel mode; but the days are pretty well spoken for in meetings and training sessions.

Other News with a view…

More personal notations. I got to meet up with Art and Jeremy at Left Bank Restaurant in San Mateo yesterday. We talked iPhone, work, and general non-work related catching up. Art lives the “global hobo” lifestyle traveling across Asia so I only see him every few months. Jeremy still works here. So, since we all worked together there at one time, conversation is usually limited to stuff I really cannot blog since my quality of blog filter is in place. I don’t care to spread too much BS about previous work engagements; no matter how much they deserve it :) . As an aside, I should also note that my old buddy Ed is gone from there too for about a week now. Good luck with finding a great new thing Ed. Your skills around Linux are legendary. You are the enigmatic sensei (that’s an inside joke for any that live on a certain IRC server).

On the technology side, I finally took my work laptop home to see how difficult the Nortel Contivity VPN client software was to get working. Good news is that with a wired ethernet interface, its no problem. Bad news is that with a Centrino setup (Intel BG 2200) it has problems. The fix on my XP work laptop was to disable the Intel Agent completely in the network properties and use the Windows Almost Zero Configuration tool to do wifi. After making that change, the Nortel client behaved and allowed me to initiate VPN to work.

My Linux musings and experiments are continuing but I’ve had to seriously curtail how many systems remain powered up last few days due to the thriving heat wave we have been having. Today it broke and we have the acclaimed fog belt moving across the bayside. Very welcome!! I’m still at play in the fields of the AMD64 and I bought two 500g Seagate SATA drives from NewEgg and connected them to a two port 3ware card and built a RAID 1 array which gives me a bit under 500g of total space. I’ll probably find some use for such a contrivance. The AMD64 boxen running Debian Sid is very fast and I’ve had a few updates which borked my nvidia drivers; but the Nvidia Drivers Debian Wiki Page helps out a lot.

If you’re looking for a nice RAID alternative fully supported on Linux, I’ve done a few of these including a huge backup system and my smaller two port home systems. For the home computer user, RAID1 provides a very nice feature set for protection of your music and photos and data. If you wanna read all about RAID and what it can do for you, consider this wikipedia entry on it.

The amount of futzing with a 3ware card is pretty minimum. Comes down to a few steps including installing the card and drives and adding power to each drive. Power up the system and choose the 3ware Configuration Utility. Build a RAID 1 array if that’s what you want to do. That initial operation will destory all the data on the drives and it will bond them together to Linux as a single drive. Now boot da Linux and it will be found like this initially:

3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.26.02.002.
scsi4 : 3ware Storage Controller
3w-xxxx: scsi4: Found a 3ware Storage Controller at 0xec00, IRQ: 19.
scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access 3ware Logical Disk 0 1.2 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0

I found it by simply doing a dmesg |grep 3ware in a console.

Now create the actual file system on the drive. Being root is easier for this; but do it your way. I create XFS file systems on these things and I don’t boot off them. I end up booting off a cheaper IDE drive and then mounting the XFS RAID 1 array.

If you don’t know how to create a file system on Linux; shame on you. You must go read!! Go find a reasonable place about how this is done so you can then grep and grok the various types of file systems that you can create. Debian has some nice shortcuts to creating them. Finally, if you want to mount one at boot time, add it to that secret place on Linux. You know the place, right?

7 weeks and a two hour cruise… a two hour cruise

July 3, 2007 in Subterfuge | No comments

Its been 7 weeks now and I’ve been watching how I eat but mostly watching and counting what I eat. I’ve reached a few tentative conclusions about dieting.  Dieting is work!  You have to commit like to some kinda relationship where you want to last it out, make it work, live through the hard times.  You need a friend of sorts to help manage you, give you tools and ways.  The tool I found is a free site which I hereby highly recommend.  It provides a great interface for the number of things which I think are challenges in the game of getting healthier, learning about how to eat (again), and basically re-inventing oneself.  The major categories to this trek are:

  • Learn how to be motivated.  The truth here is that without motivation and creativity you will not rule the day or even seize the moment. It will become mere work and a drudgery and not a goal.  Find the motivation to continue and I think it can be difficult and time consuming and it can demand a lot.
  • Find suitable resources that help.  There are suitable resources that can help.  Community resources, health professional, family.  You never really go it alone.  Here in my family unit, I have lots of support.  Outside, I have this circle of friends that tell me positive things like I am looking better, the difference is noticeable, etc.  My personal care Doctor tells me each visit how proud he is of me; how he knows I am getting stronger and healthier and perhaps one day I can dis-continue a blood pressure drug.  All these build one upon the other. Look at this way.  Without this, the next one is impossible.
  • Build a strong foundation.  Well, you need to know what you are after and I think its important in this game of health and weight loss and goal driven behavior to know when you reach a goal.  In my current job, I joke with a rather major hosting company I do business with at a partnership level and tell them that “they reached a milestone; a delivery objective”.  They laugh at the project manager speak.  But under that is the foundation.  For them, they pride themselves on delivery.  In any of the games that you play, delivery is important.
  • Find strength.  Strength to continue with the plan.  Strength can come from out and in. Just find it.

I lose all of the above at times and I watch other people eat things, drink things, and I want.  Its really hard.  I think its never easy.  There is never a point where you can really say “I’m done with that over-eating thing”.  You always have to measure, account, track.

I’m looking at this after 7 weeks and 30 pounds.  There is no end and no time I could say its okay to sink back.  But I wonder… What other life goals can you apply the same lessons I’ve learned?  We’ll see what happens next :)

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iTunes 7.2 and ipod corruption

June 4, 2007 in Current Events, Subterfuge | No comments

I’ve never really liked iTunes but as I’ve blogged before, I’ve gotten spoiled in being able to get my music fix.  I still have to run it through a reverse DRM application called SoundTaxi to make the music the way I want it.  I don’t like DRM and I don’t like iTunes 7.2 when it f**ks up my ipod to such a level that its just “corrupted”.  Why is it corrupted; I wonder?  If I plug it into Debian Stable, it works and I can move music to it.  The Linux applications that can read it and write to it seem fine; which leads me to my last vent above.  I don’t think that iTunes on a Mac is as screwed up as it is on Windows XP; but then I ask the inevitable questions.  Why even run XP when all I use it for any more is to get music from iTunes.  I could run iTunes in VMWare Player and really get away from real instances of XP completely.

Most of all, why cannot Amazon sell DRM free mp3’s that I can just download and use on Linux?  I am not a “arrgh matey” if you know what I mean.  I plan on only using the music myself that I purchase.  But I want freedom to use it as I want.  This DRM crapola is rediculous and limiting and music is supposed to set you free.  I notice that iTunes now has their iTunes Plus version which offers DRM free music; but of course you have to upgrade to iTunes 7.2 which then corrupts my ipod with every reboot.  And everyone knows that XP likes to reboot with any ole change.

I am only hoping that Amazon decides to make their mp3 download service available to us running Linux.  I’m this close to going back to buying my music on CD media and then ripping it; but truth be told the pieces I like about iTunes are its collections.  My XP box is this close to becoming a Debian box at this point :)

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Bringing it all together, sideways, getting down with it

June 15, 2006 in News, Subterfuge, Views | No comments

Sometimes you gotta be iron and sometimes you just gotta flow.  The last few days I’ve been the kid Daddy while my ever-loving wife was back taking care of a family thing.  This is not a new thing for me.  I was a SAHD for some years and I found it exciting, fun, and a learning thing.  But I also had this desire to get back to working.  The staying at home thing is work.  Never let it be said that someone that stays at home just rumbles through the soap operas, daytime TV, reality shows on a rerun circuit.  Nope.  Its more like home support.  Mopping, vacuuming, washing and drying clothes that kids seem to get dirty by staring at them, doing my wife’s Nursing uniforms while she was doing two jobs because there was no one job for me.  It was tough those years but I knew some corner had been traveled when my daughter would run to me complaining.  I was the SAHD and I knew it.  I had the authority.  I could rumble and tumble, make up how the kids were to behave, build sets of rules.  It was all okay but I started wanting to get back into some semblence of a work force. 

Back before doing archeology, I just roamed and was a hermit, a traveler, a scientist, a stranger even at home.  That was an interesting life though and many time I gaze at the Hayward Hills and remember other hills and valleys, forests and deserts.

These last few days this was all brought back to me.  I could not go to work and I missed it.  I had email and IRC and the phone; but I missed the office.  Last year this time, I worked at home all the time and I had an issue trying to carve the time out to actually get things done.  I was there so I did things for the family but I often stayed up until 2 or 3am because I worked with folks in India and their day started at other times. 

There is no main message to this blogpost I would gather.  I just read it over again and I have not made a point other than a jumble of ideas about time and space.  But that’s okay.  Because sometimes you just flow and sometimes you are iron.

weekend deliberations

May 21, 2006 in Subterfuge, Views | 1 comment

Weekends are always a relaxation time.  I pull away from work on Fridays and have this sensation that I have this well of time to drink beer, watch old westerns, read stuff.  Every other weekend I get to sleep in as late as I want too!  Sleeping in, no 7 year old telling me at 0530 that its time to get up; no 15 year old insisting on some tribal rites of passage… its a good thing!

I’ve tried also to stay away from news.  News frustrates, angers, and disappoints me.  That is until this morning when I saw coverage of the Bay to Breakers race.  Here in full glorious sight were people with bags on their heads, other people with nothing on at all, still others dressed as various and sundry characters.  With all the serious news that we all have to contend with; its good to also have a thing to write about which tips the other scales. 

I don’t have serious topics to blog about today.  Its more like a recap of a weekend of rain and some shine and a bit of humor.  I noticed that the average amount of time spent blogging is falling off of late.  With the best of intentions I still read using one of them RSS gators.  On Linux, I’ve been using Liferea which is pretty nice.  But, I’ve also been using the Sage extension for Firefox which rules in the areas of quick reading of a few feeds.  If you want one that can travel across OS’es and a Firefox extension is not your cup of tea; may I humbly suggest RSSOwl?

I also spent some time this weekend getting rid of my last real XP system and replacing it with VMware Server and a virtual XP system.  I just don’t need XP any longer on a real computer.  VMware Server is very nice and easy to install and I can reach my install of XP Professional from anywhere on my home LAN.  Its pretty respectable in speed even over 11g wireless connections.  If you don’t know about VMware Server its what GSX Server turned into.  Give it a look if you want to run virtualized guests within Linux.  Works very well.  I came down to realizing I only need XP Pro for a few tasks on a weekly basis and most times with what I do now,  I can get by with VMware sessions.

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