Voder-Vocoder

I went to the bank the other day and got a roll of dollars. A third of them were Susan Bs. Why the hell doesn’t the governement pull these out of circulation? They are universally acknowledged to suck. They look and feel like quarters.

I just got rhythmbox working for the first time. I needed to do a “sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-mp3”. Of course!

Review to follow.

UPDATE 1:00 pm.

It would seem that I stayed out all night and then came home and figured out how to make rythembox work. Huh?

Okay. here’s the deal. My distro, FC1, ships with a broken copy of xmms. You can get xmms-mp3 from the Livna.org repository, but xmms still looks like crap. So if you get Ryhtembox, its dependances (like gstreamer), and gstreamer-plugins-mp3, you get a much better music player.

F, it just hung. Damnit.

UPDATE 2004-08-11: I’ve been happy with rhythmbox for the last several months. I reccomend. Yet it still needs a few more features.

Wondeful farce.

I’d love to adopt Linux but am still trying to mount /dev/clue ;-)

Well, that’s easy. First, download the latest 2.6 kernel (/dev/clue on 2.4 kernels is still experimental). Use a vanilla kernel, the clue patch is probably not working with the kernel your distro may offer. Then get the clue patch, apply it, recompile (configure the clue as module, building it directly into the kernel is not well tested), don’t forget to make modules && make modules_install. Install your new kernel (if you use LILO, dont forget to call /sbin/lilo) and reboot. Type modprobe clue. Then look in the proc filesystem if clue has properly initialized. If not, you might have to create a /etc/clue.conf for your system (see the Clue-device-HOWTO for details, but beware that some instructions there are out of date, so check the CHANGES file of the current release). As soon as everything is running, there should be the clue device in you /dev. Now you need to activate the clue filesystem (installed together with the clue device, just do modprobe cluefs). Now you can just issue the corresponding mount command (the exact options can be found on www.cluefaq.org), and voila. To have your clue activated and mounted automatically, you should adapt your modules.conf and fstab.

(link)

LegalTorrents.com

“All accessible microstates are equally probable.”

In other words, don’t be surprised at your cards. It’s as likely as anything else that could have happened.

I installed a Gimp 2 beta off of fedora.us. It rocks. Here’s an image I made with it.

Definition:

Bloody Omelet. Omelet with a liberal amount of salsa in the middle.

From David Brooks’ March 16 Column (link):

I am trying not to think harshly of the Spanish. They have suffered a grievous blow, and it was crazy to go ahead with an election a mere three days after the Madrid massacre.

Because democracy isn’t worth it in the face of terrorism. The USA has suffered a grievous blow, and it would be crazy to go ahead with an presidential election a mere three years after the 9/11 massacre. Oh well, I guess that we’ll just let GWB be president for life.

Nor is America itself without blame. Where was our State Department? Why hasn’t Colin Powell spent the past few years crisscrossing Europe so that voters there would at least know the arguments for the liberation of Iraq, would at least have some accurate picture of Americans, rather than the crude cowboy stereotype propagated by the European media? Why does the Bush administration make it so hard for its friends? Why is it so unable to reach out?

Maybe because the war was unjustified? Maybe every time Colin Powell went to another country and asked for help, they asked for evidence against Iraq and he HAD NONE.

Someone should port TeXShop to linux.

On the Deficit:

Q. What is the federal budget deficit?

A. It is a gigantic number of dollars — like 300 jillion skillion drillion — that the federal government is spending, despite not actually having it.

Q. Is that legal?

A. It is if you have nuclear weapons.

—Dave Barry (link)

I’ve decided to back up my mp3 collection for the first time ever. It’s a whopping 14 Gb. which I split up among 21 CDs.

I’ll be burning all night.

At least I automated the task somewhat. I wrote a script that softlinks the files into directories each less than 700000kb.

Be sure to use “mkisofs -f” (follow symbolic links).

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#DTPD#
#
# Arguments: file containing list of
#   files to be backed up.
#
# To Do: Jolietify (64 char filename).
#        Preserve directory structure.

$backupdir = "\$HOME/MP3_BACKUP";
system("mkdir -p $backupdir");
$num=1;
$dirnum = &padnum($num);
system("mkdir $backupdir/$dirnum");
while ($file = <>) {
    chomp ($file);
    @ar = split (/\//, $file);
    $short = pop(@ar);
    $dir = "$backupdir/$dirnum";
    $new = "$dir/$short";
    &link($file,$new);
    $size = `du -Ls "$dir"`;
    chomp ($size);
    if ($size > 700000) {
        system("rm \"$new\"");
        $num++;
        $dirnum = &padnum($num);
        $dir = "$backupdir/$dirnum";
        system("mkdir -p $dir");
        $new = "$dir/$short";
        &link($file,$new);
    }
}
sub link {
    my $o = shift;
    my $l = shift;
    system("ln -s \"$o\" \"$l\"");
}
sub padnum {
    my $num=shift;
    return "00".$num if $num<10;
    return "0".$num if $num<100;
    return "$num";
}

The Economist is a great news source, even though thay support Bush. Last week they came out again in support of gay marriage. Here’s a reader’s response:

…In the South, we are stereotyped as homophobes and Bible thumpers but most of us do not view homosexuals as second-class citizens. However, gay relationships should be viewed as second-class in comparison with heterosexual marriages….

John Fioranelli
Oxford, Mississippi
(link)

This proves once again that southerners are incapable of rational thought and probably shouldn’t be allowed to elect their own government.

And people asked my why I left…