If you find that GIMP for Windows crashes frequently, try installing the GTK+ for Windows Runtime Environment. It seems to fix many of the instabilities for me.
Category: computers suck
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rockin’ the plastic: four turntables and an mp3 share
Now I’ve got the Soundbridge set up to share from my server, I’ve been ripping CDs like crazy. I’ve got two drives on my Ubuntu box, and hooked an external CD drive to my laptop, so I’m rocking four drives at once. After years of using Grip, I converted to Abcde this weekend. What I really like about it is that I can run multiple copies at once, and it very nearly things right (aka “my way”) out of the box.
By the end of tonight, I should have about 6700 tracks on my share, and a bunch of CDs in storage.
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oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about
This is my work PC running Firefly Client, serving my music from home. Who needs to install and manage local music libraries now? -
default means default, microsoft
When I’ve specified the default e-mail signature, I shouldn’t have to click on another drop-down called default to make it appear in my Outlook message:
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it is good
I just installed Firefly Media Server and it is good.
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combines the snark with the useful
Down for everyone or just me? helps you tell if a site’s working, or if it’s just your router. I could’ve used this earlier in the week, as I frantically fiddled with my router until I noticed the crew working on the pole line …
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bbtrackerwpt – create GPX files of named waypoints from bbtracker
I like bbtracker -it’s a very simple GPS track logger for the Blackberry. It has (at least, at the current version) one problem – you can’t create waypoints in the way that most GPS applications would expect. You can, however, name trackpoints – so I wrote a little perl script to extract all the named trackpoints from an exported GPX files, and save them as waypoints.
Download bbtrackerwpt – converts named trackpoints from bbtracker GPX into waypoints. You’ll need XML::Simple for this to work.
I imagine this script has a limited audience, and quite likely a limited lifetime. The author of bbtracker has said they’d provide waypoint support in the next version. You know me and patience, though …
If I remembered more XSLT, I’d have done this the proper way. As is, I create XML using Perl
printstatements. I’m probably okay, as the name field is the only piece of free-form text, and I do some rudimentary escaping of characters that XML doesn’t like. The output seems to validate, which is more than the GPX that bbtracker produces does. The length of your GPS track may vary 😉 -
Make Link
Make Link :: Firefox Add-ons copies the current page as a link. Just like that.
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wordpress can’t count: my 2000th blog posting
I was all exited about my 2000th post, because the dashboard is showing:
So I decided to tabulate my entries by number, and discovered that I really have 2261 (well, 2262 now) blog entries. This is the real story:
The numbering seems to have gone sideways in the last 1000 entries; entry #1000 is, as they say, what it is.
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I don’t know what it did, but I wish it hadn’t done it
Outlook has now decided that I need all my e-mail text in huge. I have no idea why.
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rsync to an NSLU2
My only real complaint with my Linksys NSLU2 is that it doesn’t have a very accurate clock. Tools like rsync expect identical timestamps, or flag source and destination files as different. This causes most of your files to be rewritten, even though the source and destination are in fact the same.
This fixes it:rsync --size-only -av src dest -
this is me hating on Office 2007
MS Office’s menus may have been a mess, but that’s no reason to replace them with something equally complex but different.
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auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels
auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).
Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.
Running
auplabels file.aupwill generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:0.00000000
191.57333333
376.08000000
550.76000000
…You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):
0.00000000Â Â Â Â Â Battle of the Blues
191.57333333Â Â Â I Quit My Job
376.08000000Â Â Â Ain't Goin' My Way
550.76000000Â Â Â Wake Up Hill
…If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.
(Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)
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how to fix the annoying Ubuntu/Debian XML::SAX install problems
Debian and its derived distributions have a policy about packages not being able to modify the configuration of other packages. While this might generally seem like a good idea, for the TIMTOWTDI world of Perl, this causes problems.
The problem arises if you have installed Perl XML modules from both CPAN and the Debian (or Ubuntu, or whatever) repositories. Debian’s modifications subtly break the XML::SAX module, on which most Perl XML modules (including the brilliant XML::Simple) depend. If you’ve been naughty and used a module from CPAN, Debian gets its knickers in a knot, and won’t configure or run anything remotely related to libxml-sax-perl.
If you get the error Can’t locate object method “save_parsers_debian” via package “XML::SAX” at /usr/bin/update-perl-sax-parsers line 90, your system is affected. You might get the clue that any of your Perl XML handlers freak out and fail in weird ways.
Here’s a method (there’s always more than one, of course)Â to fix it. This was combined from a couple of sources, each of which was on the right track but didn’t entirely work. Actually, the first might’ve been right on the money, but my hiragana’s a bit ropey …
- make sure you’ve got your system up to date with
apt-getoraptitude. sudo cpan CPANPLUS(this will ask you lots of questions, to which you should almost always answer with the default)sudo cpanp -u XML::SAX(this takes quite a while, and produces no output for most of it)LC_ALL=C sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxml-sax-perl(theLC_ALL=Cmight not be strictly necessary, but it worked for me)
You must remember never to pretend to be smarter than the Debian maintainers, and suitably chastened, may now return to your normal OpenSSH patching activities …
- make sure you’ve got your system up to date with
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mind you
I did just upgrade my server from the previous version of Ubuntu LTS to 8.04 LTS, and it went without a glitch. I had to edit one config file, and it’s all running smoothly.
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my only gripe with the heron
I’m quite happy with Ubuntu. If a user didn’t have to be tied into specific, Windows-only applications, I’d recommend it. It’s stable, fast, intuitive and pretty.
My one annoyance is what the latest release has done to CD/DVD drive naming. In the past, my machine’s first DVD drive was hda. For no reason whatsoever, Ubuntu decide to call it sr0. Similarly, the drive’s name for command-line tools now has a different specification.So all my applications need to be told where the drives are; a pain.
Maybe I’ve been at this too long – I still like to use applications that I can see what’s running in the background, so I use grip over gstreamer (mainly because, unless you’re using lame, I’m not listening to your mp3s), cdrdao over (whatever the young kids are using today to burn gapless audio). At the very least, I would have liked to get a summary of changes when I upgraded Ubuntu. Better still, I’d have liked a list of reasons for the changes. Unless my CD/DVD drive is now faster and more secure, why change?
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need for speed
If you are finding your Ubuntu upgrade slow, I found it worth changing my default download server. Under System -> Administration -> Software Sources you can choose a new server. It has a Choose Best Server test, which pings all 185 Ubuntu download servers and picks the best one for you.
The default Canadian server is swamped at the moment, but the good people at Rochester Institute of Technology are the fastest for me.
