Perplexed feline quoting Yuuko-san

In this world there are many strange things.
However, no matter how strange or bizarre a sight is, if there is no one there, if there is no one to see it, if people are not involved, it is just a simple phenomenon.
Just something that happens.
That is because in this world people are the strangest beings. [*]

True. My feline curiosity makes me want to understand all the world around me. However, what's most complex, perplexing and difficult to model/perceive correctly is human behaviors.

[*] The first lines from xxxHolic ep1, as translated by Shinsen-Subs

How to turn the installation of a network printer into an adventure

We need the print server's IP, the printer's model, and, in this case, Murphy as a consultant.

On Linux:

1) Go to http://localhost:631 , or to System Settings - Printers
2) Select "add a printer"
3) Select "network printer"
4) Enter print server's IP
5) Enter printer model
Done. Fortunately, everything is left to the OS.

On Windows, running on VirtualBox on the Linux host:

1) Google and download print server drivers
2) Google and download printer drivers
3) Run the print server installer
4) Exit the installer, because it needs the drivers to be there
5) Run the printer installer
6) Exit the installer, because it looks for the printer locally
7) Repeat steps 3 to 6 a few times
8) Run the printer installer
9) Select "Advanced install"
10) Install the drivers together with a non-existent local printer
11) Run the print server installer
12) Exit the installer, because it cannot auto-detect the printer and does not let you enter the IP manually
13) Shutdown VirtualBox
14) Switch Linux to the same wireless network as the print server, which fortunately happens to be within range
15) Set VirtualBox to bridged networking rather than NAT
16) Turn on VirtualBox again
17) Run the print server installer
18) Select print server
19) Select printer
20) Print test page
21) Shutdown VirtualBox
22) Switch back to the secondary (bridged) wireless network
23) Put back NAT on VirtualBox
24) Turn VirtualBox back on
25) Realize that the test page fails even though you can ping the print server
26) Install a PDF printer and print from the host OS
The OS does have a nice and pretty printer installer, as well as a nice and pretty hardware installer, but noooo, everything has to be overridden by things that don't take all use case scenarios in mind...

THANK YOU, Flying Dog Records!

So I purchased the FictionJunction LIVE 2008-2010 CD. First of all, it had the beloved "Compact Disc Digital Audio" sign, which means it's probably not copy-protected. But the biggest surprise came when I opened it in my PC and... guess what?... It contained all songs in MP3, OGG and FLAC!!!! ☺ ☺ ☺

Nowadays, one of the most common things to do once you purchase a CD is to rip it so you can listen to it on your PC/phone/mobile device/whatever. Most companies try to stop you from doing that. In the process, they become so strict that we've probably all seen cases where you buy a CD, realize it won't play on your car stereo/old CD player/whatever, put it back into its box and download the music so you can listen to it. Of course, this means you probably won't buy the next CD because it will be useless anyway. And then you see great record companies such as Flying Dog Records saying "okay, these songs will be ripped anyway, so here you go". THANKS! ☺

A few links:

• FictionJunction LIVE 2008-2010 CD on Amazon (English link on the top right of the page)
  
• Flying Dog Records homepage (check them out, they've got a few more cool artists as well)
• Kajiura Yuki homepage
• FictionJunction homepage

So, now you know which record company to support! ☺

A2DP, ALSA and Pulseaudio

EDIT: Upgraded to Maverick and everything works out of the box, like a charm, even without Pulseaudio! The only thing I still need Pulseaudio's volume control for is to switch between one-way high-quality A2DP and full-duplex low-quality on the fly!

Read on if you want to see how it was just a few months ago.

---

So I was trying to get my Bluetooth headset working on Linux. It was not easy... I used this guide, but using Blueman to pair my headset and connect audio to it. Unfortunately, .asoundrc and pactl still have to be typed in by hand. As a sidenote, if instead of "auto" you type "voice" in .asoundrc , the Pulseaudio volume control will let you graphically change whether you want one-way high-quality A2DP or full-duplex low-quality! However, this also seemed to change the sink name from "alsa_output.btheadset" to something with Bluez and your device MAC address, so just copy-paste the new entry from the manager instead of looking for that particular line. No big deal. Also, Blueman will keep saying that it cannot connect the audio source, but you can safely ignore that - it will work.

The plus side is that you can decide on-the-fly that this application should use the audio card and that one should use the Bluetooth headset. In practice, it means that you can have your music playing through the PC speakers while using your headset for audio conferencing, and then change your headset to A2DP mode and switch music playback there without even stopping your music. Pretty cool stuff.

I ended up ditching Pulseaudio some time ago. To me, it was a useless layer between the actual sound engine and the user. I'd just leave it there if it worked, but unfortunately, on all of my installations it would decide to just stop working eventually - and, off it goes. However, even though it's actually ALSA who gives audio to the new device, I cannot get it to appear in alsamixer or Phonon, so I had to reinstall Pulseaudio. If anyone has any clues as to why it might happen, I'd love to know!

If I had more free time, I'd write a few tools to automate A2DP and Bluetooth DUN [which, by the way, is yet another painful story - always configure your phone as a Bluetooth modem before you end up with no other Internet connection! You'll probably be able to connect rfcomm0 using Blueman, but mine didn't manage to dial up the connection afterwards. Graphical tools such as kppp somehow didn't work either, so I had to do a lot of experimenting with pon chatscripts.] However, since I probably won't actually sit down and code something meaningful, I'll just cross my fingers and hope that someone else will do it for me within a few years :)

How average is an "average user"?

Very often, you will hear software designers talking about "average users". In fact, many of them speak of an "average user" and think of a "dumb user". With this assumption, they lose many users at the high end of the curve...

It makes sense to take the really average user, take a certain confidence interval and make sure that both "pretty naive" and "pretty advanced" users will be able to use your software. However, there's also a limitation on the high end of the curve. As much as a "dumb" user will be confused by too many options or complicated operations, a "geek" user will be annoyed because the software will pretend to know what he wants to do better than he does. Advanced users often have a particular and complex use case scenario in mind. If the software is over-simplified, you'll probably end up losing them, just as much as you'll lose the naive users if the software is too complex.

In a few words, if you ask yourself "could my grandmother use this?", make sure it's not something that only your grandmother would use.

Wikipedia robot annihilating My Little Ponies

The Wikipedia page for "Particle annihilation" points to "My Little Pony" (try here if it's been fixed in the meantime). If you wonder who was having fun, it was just Wikipedia's robot trying to fix a supposed double redirection, as you can see in the page history. The page for "Particle Annihilation" redirects to the correct page. If you wonder what's different, yes, it's just the capital A. Now, you'd wonder why the robot chose to redirect to "My Little Pony"? Go figure... (In any case, poor ponies!)

Keeping animals alive

Bionic feet for amputee cat: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10404251.stm
(I could not get to embed the video, but do look at it!)


Artificial fin for a dolphin:



Quoting the video's description: Tyre manufacturing company has come to the rescue of Fuji the dolphin who was stricken by a mysterious life threatening illness and lost her fin. She caught a disease that begun gradually rotting her tail and her tail had to be amputated to save her life. For awhile the now 37-year old Fuji survived without a fin, but her lack of exercise and weight gain proved problematic. A friend of the handler's working at one of Japan's leading tyre makers, Bridgestone Corp, offered to make them an artificial tail fin for Fuji, the first of its kind in the world. The result was a tail fin 30 centimetres in length and 70 centimetres wide, a bit smaller than the tail of a healthy dolphin of Fuji's size.

Blu-Ray : are you sure?

Imagine that you happily buy a laptop with a Blu-Ray player, you happily erase its pre-installed OS to install Linux, you happily rent a Blu-Ray movie to watch, and you sadly realize you cannot do so.

According to the Ubuntu wiki,

The AACS 'Digital Rights Management' system in most HD-DVD and all Blu-Ray discs attempts to stop consumers from exercising fair use rights, including:

* Playing purchased Blu-Ray and HD DVD films using Open Source software.

That might make sense, since someone could modify the code to copy the movie as well. However, I think that playing the film using Open Source Software _is_ fair use, and I do not want to support those who prevent me from doing so.

* Playing films using standard digital (DVI) or analog (VGA) cables and monitors, which generally do not support HDCP DRM, without a 75% reduction in resolution.

No big deal. (I suppose they just want to plug the analog hole)

* Fast forwarding or skipping advertisements.

Give me a break. Those who pay for a movie have to watch advertisements, but those who pirate it don't? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

* Playing imported films, including when local equivalents may be overpriced or not available.

[sarcasm]Cool - if the movie isn't available in your country, you have no choice but to pirate it. As a bonus, it would be ad-free too![/sarcasm] I'm not saying "go ahead and pirate movies", but I don't see a solution that conforms with fair use either.

But the best comes from Wikipedia:

The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player. Thus, if a given player's keys are compromised and published, the AACS LA can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles.

Simply put: you happily buy a Blu-Ray player for your home, but then some hacker uses the same player model to decrypt a few movies. The keys will then be revoked, so, one day, you'll realize you cannot play new movies anymore, even though you haven't done anything wrong!

Sony has always been a company with emphasis on quality on its products. They were always a bit more expensive, but always worth the price as well. Lately, they tend to get overpriced, even with good quality taken into account. Sony tends to keep its customers as hostages with closed formats and zero interoperability (e.g. Memory Sticks), rather than attracting them with the good quality it does have. Maddox is stating a few points as well (remember the rootkit in "audio" CDs?), with his unique way of writing about things.

Conclusion: are you sure you want to financially support this DRM system? I'm fine with DVD quality, thanks.

Humble Indie Bundle

You think all this DRM is made in order for the owners of the "intellectual property" to make more profit.

Wrong.

Power should be given to the consumers. The proof is in the Humble Indie Bundle.

They're basically saying: pay as much as you want, starting from 0.01$, you may donate any percentage to charity, and you get all of our games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD, Aquaria, Samorost). You may choose between Windows, Mac and Linux. No DRM, no middle man, all money goes directly to the developers. And, yes, they're aware that their games are available on BitTorrent. Needless to say that I bought the games immediately, though I'm not a gamer and I doubt I'll ever play them. ☺

It's not just me. They generated more than _one million dollars_ in just seven days!

Now they decided to open-source their games, thinking that it's their turn to give back.

I think some people need to learn from this model...

PS: there's more to come about DRM, I'm planning an article about Blu-Ray.

Japanese on Symbian

[introduction]
So, I found myself suddenly having to buy a new phone, since the previous one committed suicide by falling off my pocket. (I couldn't fix it myself, and its plastic parts broke so badly that even if I had it repaired it would break soon again, so I didn't want to waste any money on that). I love Maemo but I couldn't afford a N900 so I had to settle for a cheaper phone that runs Symbian.

What I love about Symbian is that it's kinda hackable! Having a WiFi phone, I downloaded PuTTY and now I can happily ssh to my favorite shells (or not so happily since I actually couldn't afford a phone with a qwerty keyboard either...) But that's not a hack, it's rather a legitimate application to install.

Then I wanted to install a Japanese font to it. I already couldn't figure out the titles of some of my songs and had told my Japanese friends to text me in Romaji, but now I had other issues as well, such as not being able to figure out who is who on my contact lists. Not to mention a built-in dictionary application with Japanese support...
[/introduction]

So I went to the Nokia store and asked if they could install a Japanese font for me. They said that all they could do was to install the Japanese firmware instead, which I didn't want to do for obvious reasons. So I decided to ask Google sensei instead, and that's when I felt a bit 1337.

Turns out that you can just find out the names of your built-in fonts and place a font of the same name on your memory card. It will happily override your built-in fonts. http://japanesefont.blogspot.com/ is where I found the instructions and it even recommended a font, which I ended up ditching for another, more "proper" font with less missing glyphs. Whatever font you use, it will work. Just pick one from your hard drive.

Then I wanted to see if there was a way for Japanese input without the Japanese firmware. Yes, there is! If you have a S60 3rd edition (like me), it's even free. Here it is: http://digilife.bz/eng/wiki/index.php?M-FEP60 . Downloads are unavailable at the moment due to a bug, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

EDIT: You can install M-FEP60, you just need to go to the application in order to switch Japanese input on and off - what doesn't work is the switcher. Otherwise, it works, though its dictionary might use several additions.

On diplomacy

If one 5-year-old calls another "stupid", the other child might respond by a bigger insult, hitting the first child, not talking for a few days, and things may easily keep going wrong just because of one or two unfair comments.

Assuming you've reached a certain age and maturity level, if your neighbor says one or two unfair comments, you may ignore him, you may say something to shut his mouth, you may tell someone to negotiate if they insist, but you'll (hopefully) try not to bring matters to a climax.

When your actions represent more people than just yourself, for example if you are a school director, a company president, a reporter in a magazine, or some other institution, you have to be even more careful on that. Keep spirits low. DNFTT.

The cat has a reason or two to be showing its claws right now. Take this as a generic comment if you wish, or ask me to answer in PM if you're interested.

Take care.

One of the best optical tricks

http://pics.nase-bohren.de/lookatthedot.gif

I assure you, it's a genuine optical trick. It's not a screamer (only the image colors change), and it's not a cheap trick.

If you want to know how it works, highlight the rest of the paragraph: When a color changes while we are focused on something, for a while we see the inverse color of the one we were watching instead of the new one.

The mechanism behind this is similar to this one.

Online privacy is no longer the "social norm"???

After Facebook's latest updates to privacy settings, though you may think you left all your settings to "Like Before", and even double-checked and triple-checked your privacy settings, there are some things you just cannot hide (If you can, please tell me how!)

One of them is the pages you're a fan of. These can be viewed on your profile by just ANY Facebook user. Apparently this was made in order to attract more traffic to fan-pages, who may have paid in order to achieve this. Personally I just removed myself from any fan pages and I also know many other people who did so, or at least removed some fan pages. Is this the effect they wanted?

The other one is your profile picture. Yes, there is a page in the Privacy settings that has your profile picture with the question "Who can view this?". You think you've set it to "Only friends", but it doesn't work. Try it - there's a button that previews your account the way it will appear to unknown Facebook users.

It appears that a lot of people complained about this, but Zuckerberg tried patching it up by saying that "online privacy is no longer the social norm". Read the article here. No further comments.