Monthly Archives: June 2004

Ken Brown is a Big Fat Idiot…

Holy crap. It isn’t often that I get a chance to read something as high in drivel as Ken Brown’s rebuttal to Andy Tanenbaum’s critique of Brown’s Samizdat, an as yet unreleased critique of the Linux operating system, Linus himself, and open source software in general. If you haven’t read Andy’s comments on Brown, by all means go and do so, otherwise the rest of this rant might not mean as much to you. I’ll wait till you are done.

Pretty amazing, huh? But Brown’s rebuttal is even more amazing. I thought I’d take a few minutes and pick apart a few points for the gratification of myself and what two or three readers this weblog might have. Continue reading →

Venus Transit Pictures

Well, this rare event has concluded, I’ll try to add links to sites with images throughout the day as my browsing uncovers them. Check back later for more…

My browsing also uncovered the following poem, written by the first individual ever to observe a transit of Venus.

Oh! then farewell, thou beauteous queen!
Thy sway may soften natures yet untamed,
Whose breasts, bereft of the native fury,
Then shall learn the milder virtues.
We, with anxious mind, follow thy latest footsteps here,
And far as thought can carry us;
My labours now bedeck the monument for future times
Which thou at parting left us. Thy return
Posterity shall witness; years must roll away,
But then at length the splendid sight
Again shall greet our distant children’s eyes.

— Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641)

Venus Transit

Mercury TransitA particularly rare astronomical event – the transit of Venus across the solar disk – will occur on June 8 or about sixteen hours from the time of this posting. Unfortunately (for me) it will not be visible from the western United States, so I won’t get a chance to observe it, but it should be visible from large portions of Europe and the Middle East. If you are lucky enough to be under its shadow, check out this site or this one for information and viewing instructions. I haven’t found any live webcams yet for this event, but when I do I’ll try to post an update below.

The image to the right is a time lapse I did of the November, 1999 transit of Mercury. The entire transit took roughly 45 minutes, and I cut frames from a simple video I did to show it working accross the solar disk. It’s crude, but it works. The Venus transit should take roughly six hours, and Venus will appear significantly larger than tiny Mercury. If you can, get out and observe, but observe with all necessary precautions to your eyesight. You’ll want to use those eyes again, I’m sure.

Fedora Core, or can a FreeBSD fan find Linux Nirvana?

FedoraI’ve been a FreeBSD user since the days of FreeBSD 1.1.5.1. I cut my teeth old older BSD systems, and the desire to have a similar system for my home machine made it the obvious choice. I also prefer the ideology of the BSD licensing scheme more than the GPL, but that’s a different rant.

Still, I haven’t installed any different operating systems lately, and I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of running MythTV, so I decided to install RedHat on my old FV24 box. This box hasn’t been powered on since I got my Mini-ITX system going, so I booted it up, checked to make sure that nothing valuable was installed on it (there wasn’t), and then set off to download the RedHat distribution.

Except that Redhat isn’t really Redhat anymore. The free version to download is now called Fedora Core. Hmmm. Things have changed a bit. I went ahead and downloaded the four CDs full of stuff (took less than two hours, courtesy of improved download speeds from Comcast) and booted.

I must admit: their installation is dead slick. I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, but Fedora is even easier. Just a couple of clicks to reformat my drive, a couple more to select the distribution, and voila, a nice desktop version of X installed and booting. I was shocked at how quickly it went. Easier than FreeBSD, easier than Windows, just plain easy.

I picked the Desktop profile, which installed relatively few servers (I am keeping FreeBSD for all that stuff anyway) but did include good stuff like Mozilla, OpenOffice, CD burners and players, and a bunch of games. They look great, they work, the menus are all wired up, and it was completely natural. Much kudos.

The only problem that I have isn’t really a fault of Fedora: it’s a problem with software licensing. They have chosen not to include items which have patents or other licensing problems hanging over them. This includes (somewhat tragically) mp3 decoders and the ever problematic DVD playing software like xine or mplayer. I need media players that work on my system, and it’s kind of annoying that further works needs to be done to get them. I don’t blame Fedora/Redhat, that’s just another annoyance of software patents.

Luckily, I stumbled accross this discussion of things a new Fedora user should do to customize his system right after install. I’ll let you know how it goes tonight when I can give it a try.

Overall though, Fedora seems very nice, at least at the 24 hour point. I’ll have to try it some more. My plans to make a MythTV receiver are on temporary hold though, I don’t have an extra video capture card at the moment (perhaps an Hauppauge PVR-350 is in my future, it would be nice to have a card with real MPEG2 encoding). Till then, I obviously need to gain some more Linux experience, and my little Shuttle cube should be a good way to experiment with it.

On Watching Weight and Weight Watchers…

I have been attending Weight Watchers since early January, and have had good results (over 36 lbs lost as of my weigh in on June 6). If you are having difficulty getting started on your weight loss goals, I recommend them as a sane, safe and reasonably effective way to get jump started. It’s definitely easier to get started when you have somebody independent who is going to be monitoring your progress.

But in a way I think it is kind of childish for me to need this kind of independent auditing. Continue reading →

Gadget o’ the Day: Hauppauge MediaMVP

Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, and streams media files from your PC to your television. It sells for somewhere between $80 and $100, which is pretty cheap.

What’s really interesting is it’s hack potential. According to a users forum, it contains some interesting hardware: a variant of the PowerPC made by IBM for set top boxes, 64 megabytes of RAM and an MPEG-2 decoder. What’s more, it runs Linux using Busybox, which it boots via tftp from the host PC. In other words, you don’t have to do anything amazing to get new software to it, just build the right boot images and place them in the right place. Neat.

Apparently it does not have sshd or telnetd installed on it, only 

 [, busybox, cat, cp, date, dhcpc, du, echo, fpage, ifconfig, init,
insmod, kill, killall, linuxrc, ls, lsmod, modprobe, mount, mpgdec,
msh, mv, ping, ps, pwd, reboot, rm, rmmod, route, sh, sleep, test,
umount

but it does have NFS support built into the kernel, so in theory you could mount media files from Linux/whatever boxes and play them on your TV. Again, nifty.

If this gadget were wireless, I’d be considering it strongly, but I don’t have ethernet anywhere near my television at the moment. I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a television with gadgets like this built in. I’d easily spend another $80 to have this thing inside my next television.

D-Day

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day: the date when the Allies of World War II began their invasion of France to defeat the Axis powers in Europe. It is without a doubt one of the most spectacular battles of all time, and represents probably the single greatest achievement of logistics in warfare ever. It’s been some time since topics related to WWII were at the top of my reading list, but I remember Ryan’s The Longest Day as being informative and a good read. You can look at this Amazon list for other books that might help you learn about the events surrounding June 6th, 1944.

Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The summer movie season is upon us, which means that Saturdays are the day for seeing the latest release of the week. Today’s movie was the latest in the immensely popular Harry Potter series.

The franchise is already well established, so you probably know what to expect: young Harry, Hermione and Ron are back at Hogwarts. As Harry returns, he is confronted by the news that Sirius Black (played by Gary Oldman), a dangerous criminal has escaped from Azkaban prison. Apparently Azkaban is not your typical prison. Instead of ordinary guards, it is protected by Dementors, nasty wraiths who suck all happiness out of you.

We’ve all known a few people like that.

I’m told that the movie is somewhat different and compressed from the book: I can’t tell you, I haven’t read it. I found it to be competently constructed and fairly engaging. The effects and scenery is beautiful, the young actors turn in very solid performances, and I thought it was pretty good fun for a Saturday matinee. If you enjoyed the first two movies, I have no doubt that you will enjoy this one. Overall though, I haven’t found any of these movies to be especially memorable, so I will give it an eight out of ten: worthy of viewing, but unlikely to change your life in any significant way.

A Corkscrew for Champagne?

I suspect that the story surrounding this E-bay posting is a fake, but if not, it’s an excellent justification for the notion that some people just shouldn’t have kids.

I’m giving another try at trackbacking to the original metafilter posting, but something is obviously wrong with either my understanding of trackback or the crosstalk between metafilter and wordpress. More investigation is needed.

Keeping Score…

Okay, okay. I’m still on the baseball kick. Sorry for all of you who are bored with this topic, but I couldn’t help myself: metafilter had a link to a guide to keeping score in baseball. Until I started attending baseball games and sitting in good seats, I never saw anybody do this, but I must admit, I’m kind of fascinated by the idea. I’ve started to see baseball as an arcing story line: with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and keeping accurate score of the events helps you understand the story of a game. In the end, understanding the game makes it more enjoyable.

Of course, I may just sit down and munch hot dogs and enjoy the sunshine. That is good too.

Free Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks

Project Gutenberg – Audio eBooks Read by People lists eight different books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all read by humans (much better than the terrible simulated voices of other Gutenberg entries). These will soon be parked on my iPod for consumption later.

For those of you with curl installed, the following will fetch all 25 parts of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

curl -o 'advsh32#1.mp3' -G 'http://gutenberg.net/etext05/advsh32[01-25].mp3'

Letters from Iraq

You can read all the blog posts of Jeremy Botter made as a soldier on duty in Iraq as a PDF file. Interesting stuff, and testimony to how the ability to immediately self publish on the web allows us to experience and communicate with others in ways we our parents couldn’t imagine and our children can’t imagine being without.

On the lighter side, you could read these logs of the interrogation of Saddam Hussein.

I promise I’ll be back to something more frivolous and less baseball related tomorrow.