How the classes are going

Two summers ago, I stayed home and hung out with friends. Last summer, I went to Europe. But if I want to graduate in Spring 2011 while taking a relatively light course load along the way (which I do), then I have to take a summer semester (which I am doing now).

Here at old Florida, there are three summer semesters. Summer A is six weeks long. Summer B, which follows Summer A, is also six weeks long. Summer C spans both Summer A and Summer B. I took Intro to Public Speaking during Summer A, and during Summer C, I'm taking Operating Systems and Finance. Summer A has ended, so the latter two classes are the ones I have left.

Summer course offerings are more limited than during the Spring or Fall semesters, so for my computer science major, I had no choice but to take Operating Systems with one of the department's more infamous professors. He claims that the average score on his exams is 60%, which includes 20% extra credit. He also gives lots of homework, and he's just assigned the term project.

The flipside, as I've been told by my friends who have survived his classes, is that you learn a lot from him. And I seem to be doing just that. I didn't think I would do very well on the first exam, but I got a 77 (which I first misread as 11, my mind precluding the possibility of such a "high" grade). The next exam is on Tuesday night, which also happens to be my birthday. I hope the exam makes it a good one.

The other class I'm taking right now is for my business administration minor. It's Finance (properly, Business Finance), and it's one of the classes that the business college has done a great job with. They record the lectures and post them online, so there's no need to actually attend class. Instead, I download the lectures and watch them at my leisure. The quizzes are also online (but the exams, alas, are not).

I chose to be a business minor because it would give me valuable skills (and because my major requires me to take a minor, but never mind), and this class hasn't disappointed me. I've learned, among other things, the importance of saving for retirement. Plus, I've been doing very well in the class. The way things are going, I could end up with an A. Yay.

I was actually very worried that I wouldn't do well in either of these classes (Finance is said to be the hardest class in the business minor), but I've been busting my hump for them, and it shows. I just hope I can keep up the good work.

I've been linking to a lot of infographics lately, some good, some not so good. Here's a parody of pointless infographics. (Via waxy.org)

Another one of those montages of clips from movies and TV shows: We've Got Company! I first saw this before watching Avatar and groaned upon hearing the line in the movie. (Via The Presurfer)

Stupid Fight compares the spelling and grammar of celebrity Twitterers' fans to see whose are dumber. (Via waxy.org)

Installapalooza

I talked about my Thursday, but I didn't get a chance to mention my weekend yet. It was... interesting.

For many college students, the weekend begins on Thursday, and the people living in the apartment below me are no exception. They had a party on Thursday night. I don't mind if people have parties, but I do mind if said parties are extremely loud and preventing me from going to sleep. Usually I go downstairs with my roommate Andy and we ask them to turn the music down, but this time, Andy volunteered to go by himself. He didn't come back; he had joined the party.

On Friday night, there was another loud party downstairs. A normal person probably would have been able to sleep through it, but I have a hard time getting to sleep unless it's quiet. Still, I thought I should try. I did sleep for a little while, but the noise woke me up at 4:30 in the morning. That's when I called the police.

Over the next hour or so, the noise still didn't go away. At 6:00, I went downstairs and told one of the guys that if they didn't turn the music down, I would call the police. He asked if I already had, so presumably some officers had paid them a visit. I said I hadn't called, and he said that that the party was ending anyway. A half an hour later, the music stopped, and I instantly went to sleep.

I probably won't call the police again. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now they probably know that I did it, and I don't want them to be mad at me. There are more of them than me, after all, and they know where I live.

I always wake up early, even if I go to bed very late, so I wasn't worried about oversleeping. Imagine my surprise when I woke up well-rested at 11:15 in the morning. I was supposed to be on campus at 11:30 for a Linux installfest!

Technically, I didn't quite oversleep, but I came very close to it. The only time I actually did oversleep was about a year and a half ago when I was supposed to be giving a presentation for a class. Why do I only oversleep (or almost oversleep) when I have to do something important? Well, I guess if it's not important, then you're not really oversleeping.

My friend Mark, who was going to give me a ride to campus, had been waiting outside for a few minutes. I got ready as fast as I could, and we weren't too late. The installfest actually went pretty well, and we had a pretty good turnout. I helped a guy dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, and Mark got a guy's graphics driver working. There was also a lot of food, and we got to take home what was left over.

Know Your Meme is indispensable. If you've seen the one with the old-fashioned painting of a guy striking a non-old-fashioned pose and saying things like "It feels most outstandingly pleasant to be involved in gang-related activities," the site explains what that's all about. (Via waxy.org)

British humor: How to Report the News, presented in the style of a news report. (Via waxy.org)

Do you use Last.fm? HacKey will show you the musical keys of your favorite songs. Apparently a whole 18% of my favorite songs are in B major, which I thought wasn't a common key in popular music (well, it's hard to play on the guitar). (Via waxy.org)

The server post

Well, spring break is history, and now it's back to the grind. I've been meaning to mention this for a while, so here goes.

The weekend after Kate left, I experienced a strange emotion called "boredom." I was thinking about how I was starting to rely increasingly on my external hard drive, and I was also thinking about how my sister and I both use said hard drive for backups. I was the keeper of the drive, so I could make a backup whenever I wanted, but my sister could only make a backup when I brought the hard drive to her. She had made her last backup in August.

On a whim, I decided to see if I could set up an SSH server on my computer so my sister could access the hard drive from her apartment. I figured it would be pretty simple because we both use Unix-like operating systems (yes, Mac OS X and Ubuntu are cousins). I installed the openssh-server package, and that was that. (Ubuntu's wiki page was a good introduction.)

I made some tweaks to improve security, such as using a non-standard port (I know, security through obscurity is bad, but not if you also have better security) and disabling password-based authentication in favor of key files. SSH uses public and private keys, similar to PGP in the scheme I've described previously. Essentially, in order to log in, you have to have a copy of a key file that has been approved by the owner of the server. Your key itself can be encrypted, with a password used to decrypt it. This is useful because my sister doesn't have to know my password to log in; she just has to know the password for her key.

Since my IP address changes from time to time, I decided to give my server a name that would be consistent and easier to remember. I signed up for a free account at DynDNS.com and got a subdomain of the form example.dyndns.org. (I won't say what it actually is. Security through obscurity...) Then I installed and configured the ddclient package, which contacts DynDNS periodically to say, "Hey, I'm at IP address such-and-such. Point example.dyndns.org to it." So, essentially, the subdomain becomes a synonym for my computer.

I didn't realize how arcane all this stuff was until I was on the phone with my sister trying to get her to log in. She's not dumb; I just had a hard time explaining how Unix command-line applications work in one marathon session. (Try doing it over the phone as well.) After about an hour, she had a key and was backing up her stuff on the external hard drive on my desk. Since then, we've performed another backup successfully. I'll describe the backup scheme in a future post.

But that's not all an SSH server is good for. Port forwarding makes a lot of fun things possible! Since setting up the server, I've used my computer as a web proxy, which might come in handy sometime. I've also installed a VNC server so I can view and control my desktop from other computers. Ubuntu's wiki has some handy information on how to set up things like that. I could also cover them in a future post if you're really interested (I can tell you are!).

It's worth noting that if you're using key-based authentication on your server and you want to use PuTTY to connect to it, you'll have to convert your private key to PuTTY's format.

For today's first link, I'd like to showcase my friend and roommate Andy's new blog, Seek the Sooth. For you polyglots, Andy is also blogging in Esperanto and Spanish! I'm looking forward to reading your posts, Andy, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I should start using this video to help explain why I'm afraid of Google. (Via The Presurfer)

I'm too young to remember some of these, but you might find the article interesting: The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands in Tech.

Sharing is caring, it can be fun

The World of Stuff's first original video in almost three years is hardly original at all... but that's okay!

Here's the skinny: Copyright law gives you the exclusive rights to the works you create, as evidenced in the familiar phrase, "All rights reserved." Creative Commons is an organization that provides various licenses that you can apply to your works if you only want "some rights reserved." Some licenses allow commercial uses of the work, others allow creating derivative works, etc. The Attribution and Attribution-Share Alike licenses are the most permissive.

Jamendo, one of my favorite web sites, allows musicians to post their Creative Commons-licensed songs for people to download at no cost. And a lot of it is is good stuff. I've rolled a custom RSS feed that lists the latest albums uploaded to Jamendo under either the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-Share Alike license. It lets me stay on top of things.

Recently, an artist named Josh Woodward released an album called Breadcrumbs on Jamendo. He followed up by releasing an instrumental version with the vocal tracks removed. Both versions were released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. It wasn't long before another artist named Sean Wright added his own vocals to one of Woodward's songs, and released it on Jamendo under the Attribution-Share Alike license. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going!*

Both songs are really great,** so I wondered what it would sound like if I synchronized them. I spent much of Sunday working to share the result. Hence The World of Stuff's latest video, Creative Commons in Action: Josh Woodward and Sean Wright. Have a listen! They sound even better together. The best part is that I didn't need to seek anyone's permission to make the video; the Creative Commons licenses already granted it.

Here's a bit of a technical background for the curious. I haven't really worked with editing video since I was just starting out with Linux almost three years ago. The truth is that video editing software is the last frontier that Linux has yet to conquer. For this video, I used Pitivi, which is finally pretty stable and lacking only video effects (in my opinion). In the past, I might have used Kdenlive, the only other working video editing program for Linux that I've encountered, but it's a KDE application, and I use GNOME. Other Linux users will hopefully understand this.

Also, it's interesting to note that the video was produced entirely with free software and free formats. I started with Ogg Vorbis versions of the two songs (licensed as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), combined them in Audacity, and saved the result as FLAC audio. The visuals were created using the similarly-licensed album artwork and Bitstream Vera Sans in the GIMP before being saved in PNG format. The video itself was produced in Pitivi and saved as Ogg Theora/Vorbis. I've licensed it as CC-BY-SA, and it's available on YouTube as... Flash. Yeah, I know. But I have the original file if you want.

Just today, Sean Wright released more songs based on Josh Woodward's instrumental tracks. If you enjoyed "From Your Lips," do check them out!

This post is already running long, but here are a few links:

An instructional video: How to Make Your Own Soda. (Via Lifehacker)

Here's a map showing the distance to the nearest McDonald's for every point in the contiguous United States. The "McFurthest Spot" is somewhere in South Dakota. It's a 233-kilometer drive from there to the nearest Golden Arches. (Via J-Walk Blog)

* Not the only stuff that gets me going
** I like the original better

Reboot

My Halloween was good; thanks for asking. I went to my friend Andrea's to watch the football game with her and some of her friends, and we hung out for a good while afterward. No one yelled at me for not wearing a costume! Now that's what I call a good time.

I upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu on Sunday. I'm always a little wary of upgrading because there's the possibility that something could go wrong and screw up your system. It never happens to me, though.

Well, it never did until this time.

To finish the installation, I rebooted. During the boot process, a certain daemon was being turned on and off in an infinite loop, and I had to kill the power to turn off the machine. I was able to get to a root terminal with networking in safe mode, and I made it to the login screen by booting with an older kernel, but I didn't want to go farther than that.

I used an old live CD to get on the Internet and ask the Ubuntu Forums people (and anyone who saw my status on Facebook) for help. Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu; I didn't think I could diagnose the problem, and this would have been my fifth successful upgrade in a row, which any sensible person would tell you is too many.

So, I downloaded and burned a CD from the command line and then reinstalled Ubuntu from that. Next, I spent six hours trying to restore from a backup I had made the day before (back up regularly, and always before upgrading!). For six hours, tar was dominating my CPU without extracting anything from the archive I had made. It turned out that I had an option wrong. The main argument that tar takes isn't the directory where you want the archive extracted; it's the file(s) you want from the archive. Doesn't explain why it would take so long to extract /, which wasn't even in there, though.

Since I had backed up my home folder, all of my personal files and most of my settings remained intact, so it was a relatively painless process getting back up to speed. Now it's almost like I had upgraded, except that I'm enjoying the benefits of a clean installation. This new version has some minor annoyances, but it's a lot quicker to boot up (and shut down), and the new default icon theme is pretty slick.

Overall, I am pretty pleased. I just don't want it to happen again. To that end, I created a separate /home partition during the installation. That means I'll be able to do a clean install in the future without having to restore my home folder.

From Wired: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Hot dogs come in packs of 10, while hot dog buns come in packs of 8. Some guy got fed up with that decided to take matters into his own hands. (Via J-Walk Blog)

License and registration

Last Wednesday, September 16, my roommates and I each got a notice from the management:

This letter is to inform you that as of Thursday, September 17, 2009 in the afternoon, Pavlov Media will be changing its network formatting. As a result, you will be required to register. Registration is a simple, one-time only process that takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. ...

The letter went on to give a URL for registering and a phone number in case there were any problems or questions. Naturally, I thought this sucked. I was looking forward to getting away from these shenanigans when I moved out of my dorm.

Pavlov, the company that provides cable and Internet service for my apartment, doesn't actually seem that bad. Prior to last week, I ran the Glasnost test to see if they were screwing around with BitTorrent traffic, and it seemed that they weren't. But still, having to register your hardware is a bad idea. Real ISPs don't make their users do it. (Oooooh!)

Nonetheless, I had to do it. It actually took longer than 15 minutes. Registration consists of identifying yourself and the devices you plan to use to connect to the Internet. And apparently, you can have only two devices authorized to connect at any given time. You have to provide their MAC addresses, which you're told how to find on Windows, Mac OS X, and every Internet-capable smartphone and video game console in existence. Yep, that covers it!

Despite this infantile infantility, I haven't noticed a degradation in service since handing over my information. I was going to repeat the Glasnost test right now for the purposes of journalistic integrity, but they've changed the test so it takes way longer. I'll do it later.

I write about a lot of stuff all the time, and sometimes I don't tie loose ends, so I'd like to do that here. Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter to a Marine in Iraq. The followup: well, there was none. I never got a reply, and that makes me sad.

Is the Internet making our kids dumb? Wired's Clive Thompson points out evidence that they're better writers than previous generations.

Is there anything shell scripts can't do? Linux Baby Rocker. (Via The Presurfer)

Hello September

Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked "Hotel California."

I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don't know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it's all good.

I haven't been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I've been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I'd like to see things turn out differently this time.

By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn't care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.

For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you're supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it's proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don't have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?

The professor suggested going to the university's computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don't have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.

Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people's stuff at the same time, but it's definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it's been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is "ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab") so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.

Here's a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry's sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they'll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with "O Canada" as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)

Following the green star

The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a hospitality network for Esperanto speakers. Since my friend Andy and I are about to embark on a two-month trip to Europe, and because we're Esperantists, we thought we should take advantage of this great resource. There's just one problem: this year's edition of the address book hasn't been published yet. Normally it's published early in the year, but since they're making an online version of what was previously only a book, things got complicated, apparently.

Andy and I just posted a request for hosts on the lernu.net forums, and we've already gotten a response from a young guy near Paris who we can probably stay with for at least a few nights. Also, I decided to buy last year's edition of the Pasporta Servo, which Esperanto-USA was still offering for sale. I don't think using it will be a big problem; this year's version can't be very different. While I was buying Esperanto-related stuff, I also bought a little Esperanto flag and some buttons so other Esperantists can identify us. Seeing that flag just makes me so happy. I'm looking forward to staying with and befriending a lot of nice people.

To call friends and family at home or future friends in Europe at low, low rates, I set out to install the Internet telephony program Ekiga on our Eee PC. It wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be, though. The EeeUser wiki has a whole big page about adding software repositories, but none of the ones listed on that page had Ekiga, so they were pretty useless. What to do, what to do?

I had read somewhere that the customized version of Xandros that runs on the Eee PC is based on Debian Etch, so I decided to add the Etch repositories to see what would happen. If my system got hosed, I could just reboot and restore everything to the factory configuration. So I added the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

The EeeUser wiki page wasn't entirely useless. It taught me about the importance of pinning, which gives different priority levels to different repositories. I edited /etc/apt/preferences to give the standard Eee PC repositories a higher pin priority than the default 500:

Package: *
Pin: origin update.eeepc.asus.com
Pin-Priority: 950

Then I went to Synaptic to install Ekiga, but I kept getting an error message about being unable to parse /var/lib/dpkg/status. I tried some fixes as suggested on the wiki, but the problem persisted. I even restored the original settings, but to no avail. So I just tried using apt-get on the command line, and that worked. Apparently I also could have just scrolled down to Ekiga in Synaptic. The message apparently only comes up if I install a package after entering a search keyword.

Anyway, Ekiga seems to be working fine except for lag problems on my end and sound quality problems on other people's end. The latter, I hope, can be fixed by adjusting the equalization of the microphone, i.e., giving it more treble and less bass. But I can't seem to find a utility to do that. More research is needed. In the meantime, I have set Ekiga to start automatically, so friends and family who want to call me should be able to whenever the computer is on.

Self-explanatory: japanesebirdcookingspaghetti.com.

Dork Yearbook is a collection of dorky photos of dorks when they were dorky children. I'm glad I wasn't that dorky as a little kid. (Via waxy.org)

I should be working

I've been to the movies a few times lately. I saw Star Trek with my friends the Friday before last and again just this Sunday night. I'm proud to say I'd never watched any of the shows or the other movies because otherwise I'd be someone who watches Star Trek. Anyway, from the perspective of a complete outsider, the movie was good enough for me to see twice without getting bored. My friends and I also went to the midnight showing of Angels and Demons on Thursday night/Friday morning. It was pretty fast-paced, and I liked it. I didn't read the book.

In my last post, I talked about getting a new memory card for my digital camera. Well, I've discovered another benefit of having a large memory card. If you've seen my videos, you've seen the handiwork of my digital camera. The quality is pretty good, but it only records at something like 16 frames per second, so any motion looks pretty jerky. (Mmm... jerky.) I recently remembered that my camera has a higher-quality video setting that I couldn't use with my old memory card because it didn't have enough space. My 1 GB card can hold over 12 minutes of high quality video at 30 frames per second. It looks like it's from an actual camcorder. I could reach 8 GB sooner than I think.

For my upcoming trip, I've got a computer, but the keyboard is pretty small. This would be a problem for picture-taking because I name all my digital photos and videos to include the date, the number in the sequence for that day, and a brief description. After years of doing this manually, I wrote a Bash script to help me automate the task. It prompts me for a description for each photo or video and then moves it to the proper folder. Here's the script if you're interested.

11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed Alive. (Via The Presurfer)

Ah, Area 51, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Some goings-on at the base have recently been declassified, so several people have gone on the record to talk about what it was like to work at Area 51 and what some of those "UFOs" actually were. (Via waxy.org)

Welcome back, Conky

For a relatively long time, I used Conky as a system monitor on my desktop. It's pretty popular among Ubuntu users and other Linux types. Eventually, I switched to Screenlets, mainly because they look snazzy. But since my Screenlets have been acting up lately (spontaneously losing their configurations when I log in), I decided I'd have enough of that. I've gone back to Conky and all its powerful features. To that end, I've spent hours on what I believe is a pretty sexy Conky setup. Click the thumbnail for the full-size version.

The wallpaper is from InterfaceLIFT. The semi-transparent background for Conky is actually part of the wallpaper. I made a transparent image with a black stripe down the side in the GIMP and overlaid it on the original wallpaper with ImageMagick, which will make things easier when I want to change the wallpaper later. As for the Conky configuration itself, it's pretty self-explanatory. Here's my .conkyrc, and here's a Bash script I wrote to make audio metadata from Rhythmbox look pretty whether you're playing a song, a podcast, an Internet radio stream, or nothing at all.

And now, the not-so-boring links:

The difference between Pixar's and DreamWorks' animated films explained.

Wrong Tomorrow documents predictions made by public figures and keeps track of whether they become wrong or right. (Via waxy.org)

NPR did an interesting story recently on how ants know when their fellow ants are dead. As with many such things, it has to do with a chemical, which you can use to really confuse them.