The new interface, known as Unity, has made a lot of users upset, and a great deal of digital ink has been spilled over its flaws. I don’t mean to jump into the mostly one-sided flame wars, but hey, it looks like that’s what I’m doing. But I just want to peacefully opine, for anyone interested now or in the future, in my own little space (here).

So, here’s basically why the change was made in the first place. The software that powers Ubuntu’s interface is called GNOME, and the current version (2.x) was getting pretty old. By default, it looks mostly like traditional Windows, except that that the panel on the bottom of the screen is just for open programs and the panel on there’s a panel on top for the time and everything else. (Here’s a screenshot of my desktop from a few years ago.) The GNOME developers recently decided to overhaul everything and call it GNOME 3. The new GNOME looks more like Mac OS X, with a single panel along the top of the screen and a section for program icons on the side.

Meanwhile, the Ubuntu people decided to come up with their own interface for GNOME, called Unity, which happens to look and behave a lot like standard GNOME 3. I’m sure they have their reasons for duplicating the GNOME developers’ work, but I don’t know what those reasons are. I do know, or can guess, that Ubuntu wants to attract new users by making things simpler (or, from the perspective of the power user, dumbing things down) and by making them more visible on tiny mobile devices. So there’s that.

I’ve been using Unity for about a month, and I have to say that it’s so-so. It’s pretty flashy, even for little old me with an unsupported graphics card, but it’s still rough around the edges. There’s some inconsistency with the way some applications behave: the top bar is supposed to show the menu (file, edit, etc., whatever it’s called) when the cursor is over it and the window title when it’s not, but not all applications support that behavior. And some programs (such as LibreOffice Calc) sometimes don’t show up in the collection of icons (which I believe is called the launcher, which is confusing because previously a launcher was a shortcut).

One big mark against Unity is that it’s hard to customize. I know they tried to make it simple for new users, but I had to download a separate program (gnome-tweak-tool) just to be able to change simple things like the default font size (which is enormous—this is for you, mobile users!). That’s inexcusable. (In fact, the default whole theme is hideous, so I went through some trial and error to pick out a theme that I liked.) And while I found the default font (creatively titled Ubuntu) to be pretty ugly, the thin version (Ubuntu Light) is sexy as hell, if a bit hard to read at first. I recommend it.

Overall, I don’t think Unity is great yet, but it has potential. I really wish Ubuntu hadn’t come up with its own competitor to GNOME 3, but such is the world of free software: if you don’t like something (even if it’s for some silly reason), you can do it your way.

Next time, I’ll be talking about things that aren’t boring. Stay tuned!

Are you an introvert? I am, but fortunately, I don’t get asked a lot of ignorant questions about it. In case you do, it might be good to provide some snappy answers. Example: “Why are you always so serious?” “Always? Have you been stalking me?” On second thought, maybe it’s better to sit down and try to have a productive conversation about introversion, so just take these for whatever entertainment value they may provide.

I’ve been around the Internet block long enough to know that programmers tend to care a great deal about what program they use to edit text—usually for writing programs, but potentially for anything. For decades now, they’ve been arguing over which family of text editors is better: vi or emacs.

When you use Notepad, or Word, or whatever the kids are using nowadays, you use the mouse for pretty much everything except when you’re typing. Programmers often work on the command line, either because they want to or because they have to, so everything that you could do with a mouse they have to do with the keyboard. Vi and emacs have so many features that this becomes a problem, and this is where the two classes of editors diverge.

GNU Emacs and other emacs-style editors give each operation a unique shortcut that’s often fairly involved, consisting of multiple keystrokes. In Vim and other vi-style editors, different operations may have the same shortcut—but never at the same time. Shortcuts have different meanings depending on the mode of operation you’re in. For example, in the default mode, “w” moves the cursor forward through whatever text you have open. Typing “:” will put you in command-line mode, where “w” saves the file. And then typing “i” puts you into insert mode, where “w” inserts the letter “w” into the file; i.e., you’re typing. The advantage of this (arguably) is that you spend less time entering commands and more time getting things done. (Plenty of emacs users believe otherwise; it just comes down to a matter of preference.)

So, what does all this have to do with me? I had always been content to use graphical editors like gedit or, if I really needed, a very simple text editor like nano with all of the major commands listed on the screen. But a lot of my friends used Vim on a semi-regular basis, and in my upper-level classes, I even saw people taking notes in it. And finally, I happened upon my friends’ hacking club meeting, where people were wowing everyone with all the cool tricks they could do in Vim. It was intriguing.

In November, halfway through a big project for my Artificial Intelligence class, I decided to learn Vim by using the vimtutor command that comes with it. After a few days, I was able to move the cursor around and edit text pretty easily, and I used Vim to finish the project. As cheesy as it sounds, I haven’t looked back.

Vim’s commands are really intuitive, so it’s easy to apply what you learn. The commands are like the building blocks of a language, as others have put it. And I find it very satisfying to change hundreds of lines of a file at once or move large blocks of text hither and thither without having to take my hands off the keyboard. I also like being able to edit different files side-by-side or even the same file side-by-side. There are really no limits to what you can do with Vim.

As if that weren’t enough, Vim is very configurable. There’s a ridiculous number of options and settings that can help you get things exactly the way you like them, boosting your productivity. I’ve put my .vimrc file online mainly so I can download it for use at work, but you’re welcome to look at it and take stuff from it or just make fun of whatever preferences I have set that you think are weird. (“Ewww, tabs??” That’s a holy war for another time.)

Everyone who’s a master at Vim thought it was weird at first but decided to give it a try anyway, just like I did. I won’t say I’ve mastered it, though; there are so many features that I can’t even remember all the ones I’ve heard of or even used. But over time, especially if I use Vim a lot for work, I could become super-productive. That would be pretty awesome.

If you use Linux, you probably have Vim installed. You can find out more about getting Vim at the official site. The Vim Tips Wiki is also helpful, and Vim’s own documentation is extensive. Because I’m crazy, I’ve shrunk the quick reference guide and the index of commands down to one page apiece (front and back) and printed them out. Now you can do the same if you don’t mind reading 3-point text!

Any other Vim users out there? Have any cool tips ‘n’ tricks to share? No holy wars, please!

Plain Text Offenders tries to shame websites that store their users’ passwords in plaintext. (Via waxy.org)

Ahem. Anyway, the summer event that every Seattleite looks forward to is Seafair. Seafair is actually a series of events, including a parade and some boat races and stuff. There may be more, but that’s all I’ve heard about.

Well, I didn’t just hear about the parade… I was there to see it. It went down my street on July 30. Yes, that makes two parades down my street in little more than a month. This parade was different from the Pride Parade in that it was in the evening and seemed to be a bigger production (although it was shorter). Also, Drew Carey was the Grand Marshal for some reason. (I actually met him in 2005. If you remember that, you’ve been reading this blog since at least 2005!)

The following weekend was the boat thing, and everyone was super pumped about the Blue Angels doing a show as part of that. (It was actually pretty funny to see how excited everyone was.) They had been practicing near my work for a few days, and then I snagged a couple of pictures of them flying past my apartment after putting on their show. I didn’t see any of the day’s festivities in person, but I watched them on TV.

That’s not all I’ve been up to; I’ve been doing more to get involved in my neighborhood, Belltown. I can’t remember where I first heard about Belltown Citizens on Patrol, but I’ve been following them on Facebook, and yesterday they posted an announcement saying that they’d be going out for a walk that evening. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I figured it would be a good way to become more familiar with the neighborhood and help make it a little nicer.

It turned out that it was mostly people my parents’ age and older who were taking part; there were about 15 of us in all. We put on bright yellow vests and walked around the neighborhood, looking for signs of crime and vandalism. Nobody saw anything, though, so it was more of a goodwill thing. You’re supposed to greet everyone you see, and plenty of people wanted to talk to us. We also had a videographer and someone from the Seattle P-I in tow.

Also, some superheroes accompanied us. They were led by a masked man who goes by the name of Phoenix Jones. (Here’s a recent article about him and his fellow superheroes.) They also patrol the streets for crime, so they figured they could come and help. After our walk, which only lasted an hour, Phoenix recorded a video for his fans with all of us standing in the background. (Evidently, he disguises his identity online by typing in all caps.)

The Citizens on Patrol have their walks every week, so it might become a routine for me. If only I could get people my own age to come along…

For the nerds: Cool but obscure Unix tools. (Via waxy.org)

Every day, I spend some time in the Dungeon, the main computer lab in the Computer Sciences and Engineering building. One day in January, I noticed a banner on the wall advertising the Career Development Workshop. I foolishly assumed that it was some sort of career development workshop, but I soon found out that it’s a career fair just for students in my department (Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering) and a few related ones. Basically, you dress up and chat with representatives from these companies, and later, if they like you and your resume, they’ll ask you for an interview.

Since I had no idea what I was going to do with my life after graduation, I decided I should check it out. So, on Monday, January 24, I broke out my suit and resumes and headed to the Career Development Workshop. I thought I wouldn’t have to get there right when it started, but I was dead wrong. There was a huge line of people waiting to get in—way more than I had imagined.

And for all those job-seeking students, there were only 10 or 12 companies represented. Some were small, local companies, and the others were huge ones located elsewhere. When I finally made it inside, I realized that most people were waiting in long lines to talk to recruiters from Disney, Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Amazon.

I had done some research on the companies that were there, and Amazon was the one I wanted to talk to the most. They had sent out an e-mail before CDW with details on the position that they were looking to fill. I seemed surprisingly qualified, so I sent them my resume and did a little bit of research. I’d been really pleased with the dealings I’d had with Amazon as a customer, and I figured it would be a fun company to work for.

I decided to warm up by talking to some local companies. I didn’t have to wait very long to talk to them, which was good, because I bombed. The first guy I talked to worked for a local software company, and he asked me some questions about things I didn’t remember. That was awesome. He said he’d pass my resume on to the HR people for their consideration. The second company was even worse. That guy just looked over my resume and said thanks. Clearly I was not what they were looking for.

Then I decided to wait in line for Amazon. After about two hours, I had moved less than halfway up the line, but I was still at the end because hardly anyone had gotten in line behind me. I was wondering if I would even get a chance to talk to them at all, and I was also wondering how I could try to stand out from everyone else, most of whom seemed to be graduate students.

At that point, it was almost 10 PM, so CDW was almost over. One of the Amazon people came to the back of the line to talk to us poor souls who had been waiting for so long. She told us that they still wanted to talk to everyone who was in line and that they could continue talking to people in the CSE building that night or at Career Showcase, a much larger student job fair, two days later.

We said we wanted to be able to choose, and she said that was fine. But for the students who wanted to wait until Career Showcase, she wanted to make things fair: She didn’t want them to have to wait in a long line all over again, and she wanted to keep everyone in the same order as they were in this line. So she asked us for ideas on how to do that. Right then, I knew that this was my one chance. If I had a good idea, I could stand out from everyone else.

Somebody suggested that she write our names down, and then we could just tell them our name later, and they’d know who we were. She said that that wouldn’t solve the problem of keeping everyone in order, so she went away to the other Amazon people and came back with the idea of having a time slot for everyone who was interested.

I thought that was a terrible idea. People are always late for things, and some of them might decide not to show up, or their chats might last too long and make other people have to wait or whatever. Fortunately, by that time, I had a better idea.

“I have an idea,” I said to her. “Give each of us a card with a number on it. The first person in line gets number 1, the second person gets number 2, and so on. Then, at Career Showcase, when you’re ready to talk to someone, pick the person who has the lowest number.”

She said she really liked that idea and thanked me for it. Soon, she was giving everyone a number written on an Amazon business card (and she thanked me again as she was doing it). I was delighted.

By that time, everybody had to leave because CDW was over. The Amazon people were giving us the choice of talking to them right after CDW or at Career Showcase, so I decided to talk to them that night while my idea was fresh in their memory. I went to the CSE building with a few other students and waited for the Amazon people to arrive.

Once they got there, they used the numbered cards to keep people in their original order. One of the other Amazon people talked to me when it was my turn. He asked me some questions that weren’t too hard. I thought it went pretty well even though I needed a little help. We also talked about some of the projects I had done for my classes, like my artificial intelligence project. When we were done, I made sure to mention to him that I had the idea for the cards.

The next day, Tuesday, Amazon had an information session in the student union. There, they talked about what it’s like to work for Amazon and about the application process and stuff like that. They also talked about how much they liked Seattle.

I had found out that Amazon was based in Seattle, but since I didn’t like the idea of living there (too much rain, I figured) and because I knew they had offices in other places, I wanted to ask about working for them in another city. But during the info session, they managed to convince me that Seattle is a pretty neat place. I guess I’m easily convinced. Also, I figured it would be best to work at their headquarters so I could have a lot of opportunities to advance and try new things.

Career Showcase was the next day, and once again, I was wearing a suit. There were a lot more companies there because it was for all math and engineering students. I spoke to people from a few other companies, and I happened to see some of the Amazon people walking around. The HR woman saw me and told me that the numbered cards were working great. She gave me her business card and then said something like, “We’ll have to see what we can do about you!”

About an hour later, I got an e-mail saying that I had been accepted for the first round of interviews. They would be next Wednesday, February 2, on campus.

My boss had been very supportive of me in my search for a job after graduation, so that Friday, he took me out to lunch and talked to me about what I should say at the interview. He also said I should get a new suit—the one I had didn’t fit so great, and he made a case for it being the most important article of clothing you can have—so the day before the interview, I did. I went to the store in the mall where my sister works, and she helped me pick out everything. She even paid for it.

The first round consisted of a 45-minute interview for which I was snazzily dressed. I had done research on the types of questions to expect (mainly by reading blog posts written by people who had interviewed with Amazon and failed). My interview consisted of questions about design, algorithms, and scripting, the last of which I wouldn’t have been able to answer at all if it weren’t for my Linux experience.

I was feeling pretty good about the interview, and fortunately, I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out if I passed: they were going to be calling people for the second round that very night. I waited and waited until I was sure that they must have called everybody they were going to call, but… they called. They told me that my interviews for round two would be tomorrow.

So, I found myself in the same place the next day, but this time I had a different shirt and tie (I got two of each), and I would be facing three 45-minute interviews with other people. I thought I’d be really nervous, especially since the interview rooms were so tiny and it was just me and the other person in there, but it actually wasn’t that bad. I was pretty composed the whole time. The questions were similar to what I had been asked the day before: algorithms, design, scripting, and so on. One interviewer just asked me how I would design a particular system and spent the whole time pressing me for all kinds of details about everything. I enjoyed it.

The interviewers were pretty cool. The last one I talked to was himself a UF graduate, and once he was done with his questions, I asked him some questions about living in Seattle. He said that it was good that I was an undergrad because most of their applicants were grad students, and the undergrads were apparently too afraid to apply.

I wasn’t sure how well I’d do compared to the grad students, but one week later, I got the e-mail saying that I was being offered the position of Software Development Engineer. I officially accepted the position on March 9, and soon afterward came the best part. I talked with the HR woman, the one I had given the idea about the cards, and she asked me about my strengths and interests. Based on that, she got some managers to contact me and ask me to join their teams. I ended up picking Retail Systems, which deals with pricing, ordering, and things like that that are central to Amazon’s business.

I’m graduating on May 1. My start date is May 31. Between those two dates, I’ll be moving to Seattle!

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)

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 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.

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

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)

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)