Brian's Blog

I finally got my much anticipated iAudio M5 20GB player a couple of days ago and excitedly unpacked it to play. Following the instruction manual I charged it and listened to the sample track. It sounded damn good! To bad that was the only song I got to listen to before it died.

Here's the story. I connected the player up to my PC and it detected as a USB mass storage device perfectly and showed up as /dev/sdb1. So I mounted the device, browsed the directory structure, and found a Music directory. I selected about 17GB of my music and started dumping it over. At around 14GB the copy process hung and I was forced to disconnect the drive without properly unmounting it. After several resets of the player and power cycling it a few times I was finally able to see the device and mount it again, except this time some of the directories were gone and others were garbled up. I figured it was a corrupt file system so I disconnected with the idea that I'd plug it into a my windows system, chkdsk it, and maybe reformat it. Well, it wouldn't recognize as a drive letter, and it wouldn't show up as a device again in Linux either. Now, when I turn it on it simply shows a "HDD Error" and shuts off.

I'm not 100% sure what happened. I didn't use the USB cable that came with it and I'm suspecting that the cable may not have been shielded properly causing severe file system corruption. You would think all USB cables would be the same though. Either that or I just had bad luck and got the 1 in 10000 or so bad units that slip past QC.

Either way, it's on its way back to iAudio for warranty repair or replacement. Their tech support was fast and efficient and I had an RMA number in short order. Support is only available 9AM to 5PM Pacific time though which is annoying. Being on the East Coast that means I have to wait until 12-noon to get support! Also, support is only available via online chat which worried me at first. But it worked out well enough.

Unfortunately they don't do advanced replacement so now I have to wait for them to get the player, fix it, and send it back. So, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until almost the end of April before I get it back.

Man! What a tease!

In a moment of weakness I've finally given in and ordered an mp3 player. At the recommendation of fellow Linux users I looked into the iAudio M5 20GB player and found very high reviews of it. I had very specific requirements I've been waiting for before I bought a player and this meets, at least on paper, nearly all of them as far as I can tell. Once I get it I'll probably post more about it. Now I just need to wait until it gets here. Why did it have to ship out of California instead of New Jersey? When I order from Newegg and it comes out of NJ it nearly always arrives the next day regardless of the shipping method I choose. Now I have to wait the full 3 business days! Oh the horror...

So, to kill time I decided to check out accessories that could be used with this. I intend to use it to listen to tunes and select podcasts in my car. So I decided to look for a nice FM Transmitter. I also tried to look around for a nice case to protect it and let me clip it to my belt if I chose. Maybe nice portable speakers would be nice too but not a high priority. So, I started Googling around and even stopped at a local store or two. You know what? Judging from the products on the shelf you'd think that iPods are the only darn players in existence! Everything is "name of accessory for iPod". Even if it can be used with different players it's always a side note that you have to read the fine print on the back of the box to find out. iPods are good players from what I hear with a nice full feature set, but it's not the end all be all of players. There are plenty of other players that are of high quality out there. Why are they ignored?

Either way, I did find out some universal accessories. The big concern for me is the case, and the one that Newegg has in their inventory was ugly as sin, didn't protect the screen in anyway, and had no clip. You'd have to take your belt off and feed it through the loop on the back. But, I found zCover has cases for the iAudio. They look pretty sweet.

I think I finally found a system monitor that I actually like. I saw a mention on digg about Torsmo. It's lightweight and, based on the screen shots on the Torsmo website, reasonably configurable. It has only xlib as a dependency and renders just text and, optionally, percentage bars. Nothing to write home about I guess, but it's nice if you're into this sort of geeky thing.

The only thing I noticed is that in KDE it tends to disappear from the background. I glanced over the README and saw a work around but didn't read it since Torsmo works flawlessly, as far as I can tell, in windowmaker.

The thumb to the left links to a full screen shot of how it looks on my desktop. And below is a close up of just the Torsmo display. It's pretty much default, but fairly complete it seems. It can even watch your mail spool if you want.

I can't believe people like this ever make it beyond grade school. The best is he said he's a computer expert and apparently doesn't know what an operating system is. Ahh, never under estimate the power of stupid people...

Some ages ago I was looking into streaming my music collection to wherever I happen to be. In my quest to do so I stumbled on Slimserver which is pretty darn cool in and of itself. But it just seemed kind of clunky so I stopped using it. A couple of days ago I asked around on the LVLUG mailing list for an alternative and was pointed to gnump3d. I have to say, this is pretty darn sweet. You don't have to "introduce" each player to the sever like you do with Slimserver, you just point your browser to it, create your play list, and it just plays. It's got everything I've thought of that I wanted. The ability to restrict access via passwords or IP addresses. On the fly down down-sampling so you can stream it over slower connections. It's darn fast, plays OGG and MP3, runs on Windows and Linux, and it's OSS to boot!

Good stuff.

Over at Dean's World he has a mention about Patent Trolling companies and how utterly ridiculous this sort of thing is. I can't agree with him more. What we have here is a company who's primary purpose is to gather a huge patent portfolio and then bring infringement suits against other companies. They to this not to protect their rights, but for profit.

The company in this case is Forgent, who owns the patent on the JPEG image format.

Forgent's biggest earner -- generating $108.4 million in settlements and licensing fees in the past three years -- has been U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672, issued in 1987 and obtained years ago in an acquisition. At the heart of the so-called 672 parent is something ubiquitous in the technology world: the JPEG format for digital pictures.

In particular, what struck me is that the CEO believes that doing this is the American way. So, the American way is to look for something that is owned by a company that doesn't care to enforce it's patent, make sure that what is patented is so common that almost everyone uses is, then acquire that patent and demand money for "infringement"? This kind of reminds me of the Rambus Law Suit.

At least the JPEG patent should expire soon.

I saw an article on the improvements in Vista against spyware. It sounds like MS has really made an effort to try to keep this sort of drivel under control. However, there is this paragraph that stood out to me:

Microsoft is taking a multipronged approach to fight spyware. Unlike XP, Vista will run by default with fewer user privileges. People will have to invoke full, "administrator," privileges to perform tasks such as installing an application.

Well, all I can say is, "IT'S ABOUT FREAKIN' TIME!" Sheesh, I mean, why did it take until now to not run in full administrator privileges by default? This single thing will probably make a larger impact, at least in my humble opinion, than any of the other improvements in Vista. Yet another idea borrowed by Microsoft and called innovation I guess. I wonder if they will have the su command in Vista too?

Well, much to my surprise, the dead root partition I had on this system seems to have been fixed by --rebuilt-tree. I thought for sure there would be some major problem. Though, I'm not sure just what caused it, the drive seems physically fine.

Still, I think it's time to run an extra backup...just in case.

Well, Service Electric came to my house today and took a good look at my cable connection. The thing is, they really didn't tell me much of anything that I didn't already know. I already knew that the signal was strong, and that the signal to noise ratio was good. But the sent out their techs to check the signal at my modem as well as at the pole. Never mind that, logically, if the signal at the modem is in excellent shape that something upstream by about 100ft has nearly a zero percent chance of being any different. Well, it could be better I guess, but I highly doubt the signal would suddenly jump up in quality on it's way from the pole to my house.

That left me with two other options. One, that their network is bogged down and the need to upgrade and, two, that someone or more than one someones are hogging the bandwidth. As it turns out, from the techs comments, it seems that the area I've chosen to live in has seen a sudden spike in cable modem customers. On top of that they also said that they have been collecting readings every place they have a speed problem and nearly all of them in the area have been the result of the cable growth in the area.

So, at the very least, I know things on my end are working. Now, I either need to find a different service in my area, or wait for them to upgrade their equipment. From what Service Electric has told me the blanket answer is, "We are working on it." As far as alternative service goes Speakeasy is out, I just called them and all I can get is an expensive T1. Leaving me with RCN which, still, only has one-way cable. Supposedly they are doing some serious upgrading with a goal to have 80% of the Lehigh Valley covered for two-way service by the end of spring, but we shall see on that.

Hopefully, Service Electric will just upgrade their stuff.

Well, I just got a big surprise. It seems that the partition of my system root has taken a complete dive and won't mount. As usual this happened without warning. In fact, I was using my system normally, booted into Windows to game a bit, then when getting back into Linux I got a nasty screen full of errors and was told that I had to run fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-tree on the partition due to fatal errors.

Luckily I keep backups. And even more luckily I could still get into the partition and copy off recent changes in single user mode. So, here we go, lets cross our fingers and see what the rebuild-tree options does.

Man this sucks. Wish me luck!

I just posted a, what I hope is a working, version of nagg with basic watermarking. It's not what I had originally hoped in that it modifies the original images in stead of doing it on the fly. But it seems I have to learn and use something other than bash to make it work the way I ultimately want. This may be the excuse I need to finally crack open a book on perl!

Anyway, nagg is here if you want it.

I've replaced the modem with a nice new SURFboard, and the speed is still as slow as ever. Not much to talk about here other than this is very annoying. I used to be able to download a single CD full ISO of Knoppix in about 30 minutes, now it's taking hours. The upside is that they are going to come out and check the wiring and see what the hang up is, the downside is that they are going to do it "sometime Wednesday morning" so I have to take a half a day off from work. When I used to get paid salary this wasn't such a bad thing, but when you get paid hourly and are on a tight budget it's annoying.

So, I'm having a hard time believing though that it is wiring. We (tech support) went the web interface of the modem and the signal strength was about as good as it gets, and the signal to noise ratio was supposedly excellent. Other than wiring the only thing I can think of it someone is hogging the bandwidth on my cable segment. Hopefully it's just wiring.

As far as buying a cable modem goes, I finally got the answer on why they don't give you a discount for owning one. The service comes with "free cable modem rental". I'm sure I'm paying for it in the cost of the service anyway though.

I did learn though that, supposedly, I could get 768k/128k ADSL from Speakeasy which is an improvement. I'd much rather have 1.5M/384k if I had a choice. Maybe I'll call them up and see since they are more friendly to us tech types than the average ISP. I shouldn't be to hasty though and give Service Electric a chance to work through the problem. All in all the service has been satisfactory.

I just discovered this evening that my supposedly 7Mbit cable modem, which historically never made it about 2.5 Mbit, has suddenly decided to go no faster than about 500k. Of course, they want you to take a day off from work and sit around, not making any money, so they can come around "some time Thursday". So, either tomorrow I'm off to their office to see swap modems and then hope it "just works" when I get it home. That is, if I can get away from work to do it. They have Saturday hours, but I don't want to wait that long.

So, I looked into just buying a cable modem instead of renting it from Service Electric. The price of a new SURFboard modem at Bestbuy is $80 So I called up the tech support line only to learn that you pay the rental fee regardless of if you own your modem or not. Owning your own does not reduce the price you pay at all. Talk about complete bull.

I wish so much I could get Speakeasy here.

So, I think I'm finally getting to the end of my nagg project. Since I last mentioned it I've (hopefully) improved error handling and made it much more efficient and hopefully a little less deficient. For example, with the first version I wrote it took about 5 minutes to process 100 images, now those same 100 images on the same system are processed in 1.5 - 2 minutes. I've also tried to reduce the amount of redundancy. As in, why regenerate the thumbnail and slides when all you want to do is regenerate the HTML slides and update the captions?

So, at this point I'd like to ask anyone who is willing to give it try and let me know how it goes.

I decided on nagg for Not Another Gallery Generator as the name of my little project. It's done enough to toss it into the wild and see what happens I think. I wrote this mainly for my own edification and it sure has been educational! I'm still tweaking it and there are a couple of things I'd like to add yet. I've regenerated all of my galleries with nagg as a sort of stress test. Plus I wanted to get them all updated using the latest Creative Commons license. I didn't have any major problems come up so hopefully most of the huge bugs are gone. *crosses fingers*

If you feel like checking it out grab nagg here and let me know what you think.