Archive for March, 2006
Send email from Firefox with KMail
Posted by Biffster in Uncategorized on March 29th, 2006
I’ve linked to articles giving a similar but different method of getting Firefox to use an external email application. However, Scott Granneman has a short, quick tip to send email from Firefox with KMail at The Open Source Weblog.
Major annoyance: clicking on mailto links in Firefox doesn’t open the email app I want to use, KMail. Another related major annoyance: going to File > Send Link in Firefox doesn’t open the email app I want to use, KMail. The solution?
The big difference? Scott’s advice works! And it should; he did write the book on Firefox, after all! I didn’t test this, however, since I use Jed Brown’s Webmail Compose extension to send email via Gmail.
mp3blaster – another text-mode music player
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Uncategorized on March 29th, 2006
I am a sucker for text-mode programs. I do a lot of work on my Ubuntu machine remotely, via ssh, so I spend a lot of time using a shell. And once you do that for awhile, you tend to get used to it and want to do everything from the shell. Even when I’m sitting in front of the computer. So Linux.com’s CLI Magic series is my friend. And their lastest article got me to try out mp3blaster.
mp3blaster’s highly customizable UI is designed in ncurses, a programming library that allows developers to create text-based interfaces for command-line programs. The ncurses-based interface makes mp3blaster similar to graphical music players, in that there are play, stop, forward, and other buttons. The screen is divided into well-marked boxes. At the top of the screen is a box that lists all the program’s keybindings. To browse through all the keybindings, press the plus ( ) key to move from page to page.The box on the right lists the buttons to do routine tasks such as pause, forward, rewind, and play previous track. Each button also has a symbol above it that makes it easier to deduce what the button does what. For example, pressing 6 (>|) makes mp3blaster jump to the next track in your playlist, while pressing 3 (>>) fast-forwards the track.
I’m futzing around with mp3blaster right now. It’s not a bad app. But I don’t see it overtaking my fondness for mpg321, my current favorite cli-based mp3 player.
We’re back!!!
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux on March 27th, 2006
Just in case you didn’t notice, we disappeared for a week or so here. And it’s all due to bad luck with sbackup. I set up sbackup after spending 9 months thinking that I needed to take the time to get a regular backup going on my system. During configuration of sbackup, I noticed that it warned me that it didn’t have write access to the path that I gave it to use as the backup location. I figured this was just a glitch (I had just created the destination directory and set up permissions to it). So I told sbackup to run the custom job I had just created.
The effect was devastating and immediate. My entire filesystem went into read-only mode, which of course meant that most applications and services failed. I was not at the machine, and could not log in via ssh because the system couldn’t change to my home directory, nor could it launch a shell. I wasn’t able to do anything at all until I got home later that evening.
I still haven’t the faintest idea what happened. I could log in if I started the system up in single-user mode. But the second that I tried to launch in multi-user mode, nothing worked. I continued to receive, “Failure, could not launch shell” when trying to connect, either locally or remotely. From single-user mode, I noticed that 95% of /var was gone.
I do not know whether sbackup corrupted the drive when it tried writing a large amount of data to a path it didn’t have access to (which doesn’t sound possible to me), or if there was a hard drive problem that manifested itself right when I kicked off the backup (such coincidences are not uncommon). Either way, it took me a few days to scrape the data I could off this hard drive, then re-partition the drive, reinstall Ubuntu, then restore all of my data. (On the plus side, I was able to take the time to set up a better paritioning scheme for my system. I now have separate /, /home and /usr/local partitions.)
So now I am mostly back up. Every now and then I find an app or utility I forgot to reinstall, but that’s what aptitude is for. 
Installing Opera Mini on a Palm
Now that I have a PDA that can do WiFi, I’ve started paying attention to ‘net software for PalmOS. Palm packages a surprisingly good web browser, Blazer, but it has one crucial flaw: it’s too good at rendering a web page! If a page is set up to display at 800×600, Blazer faithfully tries to render it as such. On a screen that’s just a bit above 420×300, that leads to a whole lotta scrolling.
So my first mission was to find a web browser that could actually render a page for the size of screen I was using, as opposed to the size of a screen the developer was aiming for. And I stumbled across Opera Mini. Opera, my second-favorite browser, has a version specifically for devices with small screens, such as PDAs and cell phones. Opera Mini renders for these small screens, but tries not to lose too much from the original document.
And installing Opera Mini on a Palm is amazingly easy:
Step 1) You need to have the correct Java environment on your Palm. You can pick this up from WebSphere. Hotsync this to to your Palm in the usual way. This installs the IBM Java VM app. You also get preferences in the standard ‘preferences’ Palm interface. Install the Java VM via a hot sync.
Step 2) Then go to http://mini.opera.com and follow the download wizard instructions. Direct link for Palm devices.
The end result is a very pleasing browsing experience.
Find Music You’ll Love – Pandora
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Web on March 18th, 2006
Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I coulda sworn that I posted a recommendation for Pandora’s music service a long time ago. But I can’t find an entry for it, so I’d better write something now. Pandora is a combination of a flash-based streaming music player and a collaborative rating system:
Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.
We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.
Basically, you tell Pandora an artist or song, and it starts up a streaming playlist of other artists/songs that you’ll probably like based on your initial entry. As songs play, you indicate whether or not you liked the song. This helps Pandora determine that, for example, someone who likes Jack Johnson will also probably like the song “Man With Money” by Jorma Whittaker. As more people use the system, Pandora’s results become more accurate.
It’s a very good system, and it’s recommendations run anywhere from good to “Oh my god, how did you know that I’d love this song?” And, since the player is Flash-based, Pandora works on most any system (as long as there’s a Flash player for that system).
Bill Gates just doesn’t get it…
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany on March 18th, 2006
More proof that Bill Gates is completely out of touch with the rest of the world: he actually dared to mock the “One Laptop Per Child” project!
“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.”Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.
Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.
Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.
“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.
There are so many different ways to respond to Gates’s uninformed mocking… That these laptops are meant for children in developing nations, where the infrastructure might not provide electricity, let alone broadband. That the idea is to make something that’s functional and dirt cheap, so it can be provided to children who’d have no other means to use a computer. That $599 is far too expensive for this type of device in this situation.
Instead, I reckon I’ll just shake my head in disbelief.
LWN: 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Uncategorized on March 8th, 2006
LinuxQuestions.org has released it’s list of Members Choice Award Winners. The list is not surprising, and includes:
A list of winners follows, with the percentage of the votes in parenthesis. Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (19.49%) Database of the Year – MySQL (62.98%) Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (84.84%) Browser of the Year – Firefox (71.90%) Mail Client of the Year – Thunderbird (51.74%)
Out of the list, I use quite a few of the top-voted apps, including the top-rated distribution (Ubuntu), MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, vim, amarok and gaim. There’s a reason why so many others use these apps; they are well-written, and perform their functions very well.
