Planet TLLTS

Happy New Year’s everyone! I hope 2010 is better than 2009 for you and your loved ones. Now that’s out of way I’d like to post some things that I’d like to see happen in the Linux world in the coming year. First I want to see Android to continue to challenge in the cell phone market. Make more people aware and sell lots of new Android based phones. Continue to challenge the iPhone. Competition is a good thing. It drives prices down and forces innovation. Verizon has done very well marketing the Droid in a very short amount of time. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with millions of dollars to advertise your products and generate buzz. Imagine what a similar campaign from someone like Dell would do for the Linux desktop? I’d like to see Netflix release a native Linux client for their streaming movie service. I know plenty of Linux users who are Netflix subscribers and can’t watch streaming movies like their Windows and Mac counterparts. Netflix could leverage what the Mono project is doing with their Moonlight implementation of Silverlight. A little good will goes a long way. I’d also like to see more Linux adoption in schools and in government. F/OSS is such a perfect solution for public institutions. It really is a no brainer. Finally I’d like to see Pulse Audio replaced by JACK as the default sound daemon in Linux (see my previous post). Cheers!

Happy New Year’s everyone! I hope 2010 is better than 2009 for you and your loved ones. Now that’s out of way I’d like to post some things that I’d like to see happen in the Linux world in the coming year. First I want to see Android to continue to challenge in the cell phone market. Make more people aware and sell lots of new Android based phones. Continue to challenge the iPhone. Competition is a good thing. It drives prices down and forces innovation. Verizon has done very well marketing the Droid in a very short amount of time. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with millions of dollars to advertise your products and generate buzz. Imagine what a similar campaign from someone like Dell would do for the Linux desktop? I’d like to see Netflix release a native Linux client for their streaming movie service. I know plenty of Linux users who are Netflix subscribers and can’t watch streaming movies like their Windows and Mac counterparts. Netflix could leverage what the Mono project is doing with their Moonlight implementation of Silverlight. A little good will goes a long way. I’d also like to see more Linux adoption in schools and in government. F/OSS is such a perfect solution for public institutions. It really is a no brainer. Finally I’d like to see Pulse Audio replaced by JACK as the default sound daemon in Linux (see my previous post). Cheers!

So sound issues STILL plague Linux in general. I think we can all agree that the decision to make Pulse Audio the default sound daemon in Linux has resulted in mixed results at best. While the creator of Pulse Audio has repeatably claimed the issue was entirely the fault of Linux distribution maintainers for not implementing it properly it still continues to be an eyesore more than 3 years since it was first introduced. Anybody remember Linspire? They were a commercial Linux distribution that was squarely targeted at new Linux users coming over from the Windows world. Linspire took a lot of heat from the F/OSS community for including a bunch of proprietary codecs and software to help ease the transition for new users. I reviewed the release of Linspire 1.0 back in 2005 after running it on an 800 mhz workstation and a 1 ghz celeron laptop. I remember that the audio just worked with a variety of different applications with absolutely no issues whatsoever. Guess what sound server was being used? JACK. That’s right the same sound sound server that’s currently used by Linux audiophiles was successfully implemented by an uber noobie-centric Linux distribution in 2005!! My plan is simple. Scrap pulse audio entirely and make JACK the default sound server in Linux. Mark Shuttleworth should hire Paul Davis, the programmer who wrote JACK and Ardour. I guarantee the current audio issues in Linux would be resolved in under a year and for good. The only major challenge would be implementing a simplified configuration out of the box that 98% of users would be happy with. The remaining 2% could go to the “advanced” settings and do their multi-track recording.

So I noticed that for some reason if the screen blanks on the System76 running Karmic and I slide across the trackpad or hit a key when it comes back for some reason it borks audacity and the recording stops. When this happened I was able to recover and save the file then open a new instance and continue recording. I went back to the original file after the show and it said something about deleting some blank blocks so I said ok. At the time I had the other files open and things were getting a bit slow so I figured I would save and close the new file then process the other files, export to wav and open the orginal project and piece it all together. Easy peasy!

Well, when I opened the original project Audacity just sat there as if it were processing, the file open, but I could do nothing. Try as I might, it was not going to happen. So I went to manually recovering the files which were saved and not in the temp directory.

I knew I could concat all the .au files together using sox only little did I know they just using sox *.au pt1.au would not piece them together in the right order. It was a mess. So I created a script to copy all the files using the modifcation date and the file name to another location (never mess with the originals). I used sox to piece all these files together and something was still not right. Then it hit me! I was piecing them together backwards, I had to reverse the list sorted on modifcation date. After doing that in the various data sub directories (luckily there were only 5) I had the original part 1 of the show back together. I pulled this into audacity with the second part and the show was good to go (I hope). Or it seems to be good from what I listened to so far….

Yay! Happy birthday to Erin! Hope she has a great day!

Last night was the first significant snowfall of the year down here and the first actual real accumulation of snow since we have moved down to the Hampton Roads area. Coming home from the movies it reminded me of being back North. The snow was heave and must have left about 3 or 4 inches on the ground. Yeah, I know, pittance compared to most every where else to the West and North of here.

This afternoon I went for a nice 5.5 mile run. The ground was wet in a few areas as the snow was melting (mostly melted it was) leaving behind puddles slick with leaves and such on the roads and sidewalks. The first part of my trek had me running through some grassy areas that were pretty marshy, so it was a nice little wetting of my feet to be blasted by the icy wind. Actually it was not that bad as they dried very fast. After a bit I barely noticed it. I kept the rest of myself warm though.

The body glide is working perfectly. I am not chaffing on my inner thighs nor is there any nipple burn lately and it does pretty well on the tops of my feet to avoid blisters from the haurache knot. The stuff is pretty expensive though for a standard deoderant size tube – around $8.00 at Sports Authority.

The wife suggested trying to find socks with toes that would allow me to keep my feet a bit warmer in the winter months when wearing the hauraches. She even considered making a pair for me, or trying to. I was concerned though as I can see these being more of a problem if they got wet than just being in barefeet. I suspect that have waterproof, toed socks out there some where. But more than likely they cost a pretty penny.

Happy day!

We saw Avatar in 3D yesterday, not in Imax though. Man was that an awesome movie. The story was not unique but they did put an interesting spin on it. What pushed this movie ahead of the pack was the awesome cgi. Unlike most movies heavy with CGI, Avatar did not leave me feeling a bit tired afterwards. The movie was beautiful and most of the time I did not even notice that it was computer animated. The facial art has come a long way.

I highly recommend seeing this movie in the theater and do try and see it in 3D at the very least. Man, it is worth it.

A few weeks back I became aware that FLOSS Weekly started advertising for the Ford Sync product which is co-developed by Microsoft. I know Leo Laporte only cares about money. That’s fine, he’s a businessman and wants to make as much money as possible. Fair enough. I do think it’s atrociously bad taste to advertise for one of the most closed and predatory companies in the world on a show geared towards Free & Open Source users/supporters. It’s shows a total lack of respect to the community you’re trying to cater to. Honestly I haven’t listened to a TWIT network show in some time now and will definitely not listen to any going forward. Sorry that’s my choice.

In a morning press call on December 17th, 2009 Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was stepping down as head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. In his place, Jane Silber, the current Chief Operating Officer who has been with Canonical since 2004 will take over as CEO………….
Read the rest here…

What will this really mean for Ubuntu? What do you think?

I thought really quick this morning that I would like to play a little Christmas music, something nice. Where to get some in a hurry? Well, of course, I went to Magnatune.

Really, I don’t mention these guys enough, not here or on the show. As their motto implies, they are _not evil_. They are DRM free, they carry a FANTASTIC selection of music of all tastes and interests. You pay REASONABLE prices that you decide, and Magnatune actually gets money back to the artists too, much unlike the big music industry giants.

Do yourself and some really talented musicians a favor and check out Magnatune today. You can also arrange Magnatune gift cards, and , of course, listen for FREE to their ENTIRE collection!