[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] I finished reading How the Irish Saved Civilization to Susan and I'm now reading her a couple of chapters from an old out of print MIT music theory book while we decide what our next read-aloud book will be. For my programming book of the week, I picked up Eric Harlow's Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK. It doesn't deal with Gnome issues at all but if you're trying to build a custom GTK+ widget, you'll find the examples much more helpful than Havoc's GTK+/Gnome book (though his is better if Gnome is what you're interested in).
My CD of the month is Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. I love all of Herrmann's compositions, most of which were soundtracks. This is another in a series of remastered original recordings. This recording is particularly interesting because it was the first time Herrmann had recorded a performance in the new two channel technology called "stereo". The recordings were later mixed into a coventional mono recording for use in the movie and this CD is the first time the original stereo recording has ever been available. They also threw in a couple of the Pat Boone songs that were fortunately cut from the movie, but they're good for a laugh at least.
And speaking of music, last night we attended the DSO's performance of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor led by guest conductor Claus Peter Flor. It's a very long piece. Most recordings run 70 - 75 minutes. This performance ran over 80 minutes. And Claus is one weird conductor - he seems to have learned most of his arm and hand motions from extensive study of the mad scientists in 1950's B grade science fiction movies. He also had quite a range of bizarre facial expressions (we were sitting in the choral terrace seats behind the orchestra). Susan mostly noticed the odd contortions of his nose as if he had detected a skunk nearby while I was impressed by strange shapes he made with his mouth, which never remained closed for more than a few seconds during the entire performance.
Today was yard work day - a little mowing and edging before the afternoon rain. And we noticed one of our large, green anoles perched on the side of the house watching us. The males tend to be quite brave when it comes to humans and, once in a while, they're brave enough to eat from your hand. This one looked like he was in need of a meal, so I offered him a cricket. After a moments hesitation, he took it and after scooting off a safe distance he ate it while watching us out of one eye. I spent the rest of the afternoon getting a head start on next weeks work and playing with some GTK+ code.
Someone one on Advogato mentioned a new Perl site called Perl Monks. They have a much more elaborate trust/skill metric system than Advogato. I'm an Initiate (everyone starts out at this level and gains points through peer recognition over time). There are ten levels with amusing titles like acolyte, friar, pontiff, and eventually saint.
I got several replies from other old fidonet folks after my last news item, so there do appear to be others out there who remember the good ol' days.
I ran across an interesting news story on Yahoo. Seems some French scientists have successfully used gene therapy to restore normal functioning of the immune system in two boys suffering from SCID (the disorder forces them to live in a sealed environment because they have no resistance to infection). The doctors made the gene modification by extracting bone marrow, inserting the missing genes, and then replacing the bone marrow in the body. Pretty cool.
When I woke up later and logged onto the net, I immediately ran into some bad news on Slashdot - Phil Katz apparently died a few days ago on the 14th (he was 37, same age as me). This brought back a lot of memories of the early days. My old BBS, Fidonet, the zip/arc wars.
I remember running my old DOS-based BBS, The Interocitor, on a spare phone line in my first apartment. The Interocitor was Fidonet node 1:124/2206 - does anybody even remember Fidonet? The Interocitor eventually became one of the UUCP gateways between Fidonet and Usenet for the Dallas area. I was amused that a quick search on Fast produced over a dozen references to my old BBS that were still floating around out on the net. The Interocitor finally went down for the last time in the early 90's after about 8 years. For a while I was planning to bring it back as some sort of web-based thing but it never happened.
The Jargon File used to detail the history of the Zip/Arc war but it seems to be missing from the current version. For those who don't remember where ZIP came from, here's the executive summary: In the old days, we had a program called ARC, made by a company called SEA, (based on LZW compression, I think) that was used to compress files. Everything had to be compressed in those days because all we had were 1200 or 2400 bps modems. And this was before the Pentium, the 586, 486, or 386. A few lucky ones had the mighty 80286 processor but most of us got by with only an 8086 (I can remember switching from my Intel 8086 to the NEC V20, an Intel clone that could ran a little faster - fast in those days was about 8mhz). On an 8086, ARC took a long time to compress anything. Phil Katz came along and wrote a highly optimized ARC compressor in assembly that was really fast. A lot of us began using using PKArc instead of the "official" SEA ARC program. SEA didn't like this but couldn't come up with anything faster. Instead they decided to sue Katz for copyright infringement and, as I recall, Phil had to turn over all his source code to SEA - who later released it as their next version of ARC (with all references to the original author removed, of course).
Phil Katz (as well as the BBS world) were not happy about this. Phil developed PKZip as the result (there was also a short-lived PKPak). PKZip used a new algorithm (similary to LZ77) that Katz invented himself. He patented the algorithm to prevent SEA from being able to use it, but allowed everyone else to use it freely. (PKZip itself was shareware, as was all software back then - nobody had ever heard of a GNU GPL or free software.) There was a massive campaign in the BBS world to convert all the compressed files everywhere from ARC to ZIP as a result. There were special programs written to do batch conversions between ARC and ZIP for all the files on your BBS. After that, SEA and ARC ceased to exist as far we knew (I have no idea what actually happened to the company).
The Zip algorithm eventually came to be used in gzip, the GNU replacement for compress, in INFO-Zip, a PKZip compatible program which is now one of the most ported utilities in existence. When the GIF patent crisis hit a few years back, the PNG image format, developed as a GIF replacement, used the Zip agorithm in place of the old LZW compression used in GIF. Even the Linux kernel image is usually compressed using Phil's algorithm.
Phil may be gone but we'll continue to use software that incorporates his work on a daily basis.
We had a close call with someone trying to crack our machines last night. We get seemingly constant port scans and crack attempts these days anyway. In this case someone had cracked a machine at our upstream ISP with an IP that was specifically allowed to get through our outer security layers. Fortunately they weren't very good. They spent a couple of hours trying buffer overflow exploits on ftpd on several of our server and then gave up. Made for a few minutes of excitement this morning though.
I got a chance to download and compile the Linux 2.3.99-Pre5 kernel yesterday. If you've followed my news page for long, you'll remember I've been playing with the Linux USB support for my CPiA-based Zoomcam camera. It's been several revs since I last had things running and it took a few compiles as well an email or two exchanged with the CPiA driver authors to get things working again. The USB CPiA driver has been merged with the existing Parallel Port CPiA driver. This means smaller, more efficient code than two completely seperate drivers but the downside is that the CPiA driver is no longer in the USB driver tree and you have to compile the CPiA components as modules and then use modprobe to install them after the system boots. Anyway, while vidcat produces better quality images, I'm trying out the webcam utility from XawTV. At the moment it's just a boring shot of the conference room here at NCC updated a couple of times minute. If it doesn't blow up after a day or two maybe I'll point it something more interesting...
Well, back to work now... I've got several hundred emails and quite a few phone messages that piled up while I was gone.
Meanwhile, online, Advogato was host to a lengthy debate that started out being about what sort of community certification metrics were best and ended up being a flame war about politically correct labels for the certification levels. I posted my two cents on the certiciation issue. The end result? It looks like Advogato will stick with the existing certification system for now. And I got two more certifications - one Journeyor and one apprentice - apparently from people who read my article. Duff, one of the users who gave me a cert posted his reasons in his diary. This was kind of cool as it's the first time I've actually known what motivated someone to certify me. (thanks duff!). My own certification system is that I only give certifications to people I know well (there aren't any on advogato yet), people who have a well known reputation (like alan or miquel), and people who certify me, if there is enough information on their advogato page to make an educated guess at their level (like flaggz or kelly).
I noticed that ALSA 0.5.7 is out today. This should have the MIDI patches as well as a few other bug fixes. It will probably be late next week before I get a chance to try it out.
Oh well, at least it's nice to be driving a standard again. The only loaner cars they had were automatics which I find downright frightening to drive. They're always shifting up and down when you don't want them to and when you really want them to downshift, say to avoid getting smashed by a big truck as you get on the highway, all you can do is stomp on the gas and hope the lousy automatic transmission feels like down shifting. And sometimes on the highway, you'll accelerate a little during a lane change and for no apparent reason the transmission kicks into first or second gear and slams you against the seat like it wants to beat the Millennium Falcon's record at the Kessel run. I couldn't deal with that much lack of control for long with going nuts.
There's a great interview with Christopher Montgomery on Advogato today. (if you're reading the syndicated version of my diary on Advogato rather than the original, you've probably already seen it, of course). Christopher is working on a GNU licensed audio codec that will be completely unencumbered by patents and other IP problems. It's called vorbis. I find this good news to be somewhat amusing because I've read countless posts on Slashdot from people claiming video and audio codec projects were too complicated to be created as free software - that only large corporations with money for R & D and patent lawyers could tackle projects of that scale.
If there's one thing I've learned in my many years of programing it's that nothing is really as hard as it seems. Not knowing how to do a thing makes it seem hard and knowing how makes it seem easy. I've found it's helpful to start each new project with the assumption that no matter how hard it seems, if you just knew how to do it, it would be really easy. And like they say, it's not what you know, it's how fast you can find out.
By the time we finished at the service center it was too late to make it to the exhibit (maybe next weekend). We had DSO tickets for that evening however, so the day wasn't a total loss. The soloist was Evelyn Glennie, the first (and only?) full-time solo percussionist in the world. She brought a set of percussion instruments that rivaled the setups Neil Peart used during the big Rush shows of the 1980's. The piece being performed was James MacMillan's Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. She is an amazing performer to watch and at times the entire orchestra seemed insuffucient to balance her performance in volume or intensity. Her instruments were spread out all over the stage and she had to constantly run from place to place to get to the right instrument in time to play it. If you ever get a chance to see her play live, I highly recommend it.
Sunday was much more uneventful. I spent a lot of the day playing with those pesky ALSA drivers. But it wasn't until this afternoon that made any progress on them. I got some email today from Steve Ratcliffe with a patch that fixed the problem. After patching the driver and recompiling, I finally have MIDI in and out working correctly. Woohoo! Now I can do something more interesting than recompile drivers all day.
One last bit of good news today. My copy of Havoc's book, GTK+/Gnome Application Development arrived. I'm looking forward to getting up to speed on GTK and Gnome stuff. Perl is a lot of fun but it will be nice to work on some C/C++ programming again.
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