So, we thought cloud computer would be the future. But instead we have local computers crunching away on the SETI project, protein folding, and streaming music from local harddisks. In other words, the cloud is where we are. In other words, it is not just a cloud, it is a fog. The fog is coming to the Internet, and it will never leave. September never ends.

After only a few years, I have managed to match up the same port on my home network router and the built-in router in the ADSL modem, so they actually forward a specific port to the computer that runs that application. Not that DMZ was a real problem since I have a Linux machine there, but still. (With Windows, I would have the Windows firewall to puncture as well.)

Amusingly, the application noticed. "Congratulation, you fixed it!" it said when I ran another test.

The free alternative DNS server, OpenDNS, has made the fight against the Conficker worm its flagship. For a while it has promised to protect its users against the worm with its generic Botnet Protection feature. Now, it has launched a service that allows you to find out whether you are already infected, if you sign up with them after the fact.

OpenDNS accepts both individual PCs, home network and businesses of any size.

Not that any of you would need any of that, of course. Still, you may suddenly meet some ordinary person.

I have become a premium subscriber to Spotify, the European streaming music service. Most people use it for free, of course, since that is an option. I may stop paying in the future if I end up not using it much. But generally I like encouraging easy to use, legal music distribution. There isn't exactly a torrent of that, you know.

The service is free in the UK. Other west Europeans can get an invite from an existing user so it is free anyway, unless you have excess money or conscience.

Edit: Running it under WINE in Ubuntu 8.10. Because I can.

I took with me my new CD from Japan (Musuhi no Toki by Haruka Tomatsu), put it in the Ubuntu laptop and ran the common file ripper. It put the files in the music folder, with a folder for the artist name and a subfolder for the CD name. So far, so good. I did not see it in Amarok's collection, though. I opened it from the file by right clicking in the file name and choosing Amarok. It played beautifully, but Amarok insisted it was not in my collection. I redefined and rescanned my collection numerous times in various ways, even going so far as to log into KDE to do it (usually I run Amarok from the much more lightweight and faster XFCE desktop). Nothing helped. I moved the folders around, nothing. Eventually I came up with the idea of changing the file extension from .oga (ogg audio) to .ogg, which was the file extension on files ripped by the previous version of the ripper. These days, .ogg is supposed to be movie files while music files are called .oga. Well, evidently Amarok 1.4 is only partially up to date on this: It knows enough to play .oga files if I tell it to, but not enough to include them in the database. After I changed the file names, the whole folder structure is correctly added to the collection.

This is likely to be of help to someone with the same problem, if they are able to find it.

Amarok (formerly amaroK) is a free music player for Linux. Kind of like Winamp or iTunes, only better for most people most of the time. (If most people have Linux, that is. A big if, at least for now.) It reads a lot of different file formats without pre-conversion or duplicates. It seamlessly integrates Last.FM without any extra plugins, tapping into a huge web of music lovers to give you instant recommendations, whether it is to explore similar artists or simply to help compose a playlist from your existing tracks based on the relationship among them. And of course, if you are not ashamed of your listeing habits, you can use Last.FM to share them with the world, like this:
http://www.last.fm/user/Itlandm

There is much more: Smart playlists made from how often you play songs, or the tags you give them, or even the mood you claim to be in while listening to them. Automatic updating of your music library if you add files to your hard disk. Various other stuff I have no interest in: Music is a very small part of my life, by human standards. This is probably because while humans fear silence, I like it. (Just not enough to sacrifice important things like Daggerfall for it, usually.) Besides, the voices in my head sing when they have nothing they like more to do, that is, a lot of the time. But it is still enough that I went out today and bought an extension cable to connect my stereo to the Linux machine.

Funcom has upgraded their latest MMORPG, Age of Conan, to use DirectX 10. I don't know if this means you can't play it under Windows XP, but I know it means that I can't. When I go to the Microsoft page for downloading the latest DirectX for my computer, the installer runs but then complains that it "could not download the file". Unfortunately it neglects to mention which file, or I could try to get it elsewhere.

Woo, Funcom, way to make sure your game remains a small niche product. Meanwhile, people can run WoW under Linux if they so desire. Probably even Mac, although I am not sure why girly-girly computer owners would want to do that...

[EDIT] After checking a few forums, I downloaded the full November redistributable installer for DirectX 9.0c, unpacked it to a folder on my desktop, located the executable and ran it. I suppose this is a new initiative from Funcom to make sure that only real men play their game. I think most real barbarians would have smashed their computer before that though. I expect to see mostly wizards when I log in this time...

[EDIT 2] And then, after that, there are 1.69 GB of patches. I'm gonna watch Kannagi instead.

... that it is much faster to find keyboard drivers online than in my cupboard.

( Details, details! )

Running City of Heros in XP compatibility mode (with -compatiblecursors 1 added to the shortcut too) got the crashes down to perhaps once a day. I may have completely eliminated it by switching to the Classic Windows desktop theme, but that is still not sure, since it is now so rare.

Guest starring: NVIDIA, Google and The LORD.
( Read more... )

As I just told in a comment, my nearly 25 000 words of novel evaporated last night without me noticing. I am not sure if this is because I started a new project while I was still "logged into" the old project (each project being one novel usually) or because I installed Windows XP's service pack 3 after much nagging from my computer. Most likely the new project though, because the rest of my documents seem to be there. Next time I will definitely exit the program first before starting a new project - it was a kind of interesting story, although I suppose the catgirl chapter could be a bit ecchi if you lean that way. I doubt God killed the kitten though. Well, personally I mean. Most confusing, the autobackups from November 1 are still there, but all the later autobackups have gone the same way as the RTF folder. Also I did not take external backup (despite having several such devices) since it was just a first draft anyway.

Anyway, a new modern fantasy / romantic comedy / Lightwielder novel has begun. Yay. We can't risk finishing before deadline, now can we? Not after taking the whole month off from work.

Vista has tried to shut down for about half an hour now. I requested a reboot because once again the shared folder became unresponsive to my XP machine, this time after merely viewing a picture.

This is NOT an acceptable behavior for a paid product. (No, the OS does not "come free with the computer", it makes up a significant part of the price on a low-end computer.)

I am mildly amused that MS has evidently not tested Vista 64-bits in networks with XP. Perhaps they were sure everyone would upgrade their old computers to Vista too.

PS: It still responds to the ON/OFF switch when I hold it down long enough. But that's not something you'd expect to do with a 64-bits OS ever. Much less when the programs have been ended properly and only the OS is left to close itself down.

One day my favorite games will run under Wine, I hope, but it is still a long way off. Well, Master of Magic runs under DOSBOX, but Sims 2 requires Windows and City of Heroes requires either Windows or Cedega. (Although ParagonWiki claims that CoH only needs Wine and Cedega merely simplifies the installation and tweaking.)

(The speech recognition software, for those who don't obsess over that kind of products.) The reviews are in, and they are mostly very positive except for certain installation problems under Vista. It is still not recommended on laptops, but that's OK with me. I expect to have it housebroken before NaNoWriMo, although I don't plan to use it for most of my writing. I find Dragon very nice for writing dialog - it is easier to make my writing "speaky" when I actually speak it. And while my wrist is so much better than a few years ago, it will probably never heal completely.

Dragon NaturallySpeakin, the world's best speech recognition software, has been ported to Mac. It goes by the name MacSpeech Dictate.
http://www.macspeech.com/
As of today, Dragon is the only speech recognition software you can talk to in a casual manner and have it take dictation with human accuracy, as well as perform formatting and file commands merely by your say-so. If you are a Mac user and have problems with typing, please give this your consideration. The PC program was essential in keeping me in the workforce when my wrists became chronically inflamed some few years ago. The least I can do is give others the same chance.

I shall just remind y'all of the glory of Mnemosyne (and presumably SuperMemo, which costs money but also have a hundred bells and whistles). Yes, the Spaced Repetition learning programs I wrote about. I installed Mnemosyne a couple weeks ago (August 16), so it is still early, but it seems to have me pegged already. Mnemosyne is set up to remind me of data points when I have forgotten 10% of them, and this seems to work surprisingly well. I spend a couple minutes each day reviewing hiragana and 1st-grade kanji, and while I still forget, it is getting pretty close to the 10% now. It supposedly needs a full month to work optimally, so a bit of variation is to be expected.

The point with this software is to learn things as easily as possible. You can of course learn any random thing by repeating often enough, but the point here is to only repeat just when you are about to forget, as this makes for longer lasting memories with fewer repetitions. It is indeed surprisingly comfortable, as long as I make sure to spend a few minutes each day. Time to ramp up the load a little, I guess.

I totally can't imagine what this could do to an actual student who had a strong motivation and set aside an hour a day for it. Scary.

Over the last four days, I've worked my way through the hiragana, the feminine-looking type of Japanese syllabic script. I'm keeping well clear of the katakana, the masculine type, until I have the necessary mental distance to not get them mixed up. Which may be a time. Anyway, I have convinced the program that I did indeed correctly recognize each and every character, not by guessing but by remembering. This is a good thing. Today I finally got to the end of the deck. This too is a good thing. Also, I am utterly convinced that by now I have forgotten most - or nearly all - of the characters I learned the previous days, and quite possibly those from this morning as well. This may or may not be a good thing, that's the problem.
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Thanks to a recent post by ironphoenix about the unusual life of Piotr Wozniak, I came across the concept of spaced repetition software and the excellent website of his program Supermemo. The website has a lot of nifty theory along with helpful hints for users of the software. It is in fact so good that their Sourceforge competitor links to it. This free alternative, called Mnemosyne, is very much simpler, even rudimentary compared to the newest versions of Supermemo. On the other hand, Supermemo has a strong desire to take over your life and change the way you input information into your brain. Most notably, incremental reading, which is to say that you mash any article into tiny bits and read these over a fairly long period of time in between hundreds of other bits of other articles. This creeps me out, as if modern life were not too fragmented as is.

Mnemosyne on the other hand is deceptively simple. ( Read more... )

I haven't really bought much non-Japanese music for many years now. This is not really a protest agains the record companies - rather, it reflects the fact that I don't listen to music on radio and don't have friends who share even remotely my music tastes anymore. So for years the music I found was through anime. And lately Last.FM, but the problem is that the songs are often obscure and hard to get hold of. I subscribed to MSN Music for a while, but they had an abysmal selection. They may well have millions of songs, but those were obscure American songs that probably were bough up cheap because no one wanted them, plus contemporary Scandinavian songs (for the Norwegian branch at least).

Strangely enough, iTunes seems to be far more complete. I am really sorry about that, Apple being what it is. Still, it is an amazingly convenient way to buy music at a fraction of the shop price. Lately I've bought 3 albums, each for kr 80 (roughly $16). That is a third of what I had to pay in the shops when I bought physical CDs around the turn of the century; I would rather not imagine how much they must cost now. They used to get more and more expensive as if the age of inflation had never stopped in the happy little world where the record companies live. Also, price aside, I can't think of any shop around here that would have in stock Lesiëm or CMX. If they would even get it for me, I would probably have to pay extra - lots of extra.

They probably have Chris de Burgh, though. He is reasonably popular here, at least in my generation. I have bought several albums of his some years ago, "Quiet Revolution" (1999) the last. Anyway, today I am writing in my Sims 2 journal about the death of one of my favorite sims, and decided that his wife (a musician) would play a love song from the 20th century in the memorial gathering. (The deceased was the last survivor from that age.) I looked up www.chrisdeburgh.net and found some interesting stuff. Evidently de Burgh is a Christian now, albeit a very liberal one (or is that "progressive" now?) as evidenced by the song I'm playing now. He is very polite about it, but I am still surprised. This was the guys who wrote "A Spaceman Came Travelling", a lighthearted sci-fi interpretation of the Christmas Gospel.

Anyway, I now have iTunes at home as well. 2 computers out of 5 allowed. At my current speed of buying computers, I should be through with iTunes after roughly 2.5 years, Light willing. Hopefully there is something better before then. (Also because I hope to be able to move to Open Source around that time, when Windows 7 flops.)

Finally, a link to Chris de Burgh fraternizing with the axis of evil, in this case a government-sanctioned Iranian pop band. (YouTube). Apple, Christianity and Iran in one post! I make half my friends list queasy. ^_^

http://www.lively.com/
Google lets you make your own virtual world. (As usual only for IE and Firefox.)
Wor(l)ds fail me.