Anthony Barker's Weblog on Linux, Technology & the Economy

World population growth

Interesting chart from the US governement showing population growth.

I 'd love to chart the data many ways - in particular I like to see the breakdown by country/continent and the resource impact. EG chart how much oil we would use if at each time people used SUVs....

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 review

Here is a review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000(french).

Highlights:
Linux OS - Qtopia interface
4 Gig Internal Drive - Windows external drive mountable
Great 640x480 screen
USB 2.0
Intel XScale PXA270 processor (416mhz)
64mb RAM
16mb flash ROM
two I/O slots (1 CF, 1 SD)
size: 124x87x25mm
weight 298g
stereo-out for MP3 playback.

Sony's Librie EBR-1000EP Ebook

An update on the Librie EBR-1000EP made by Sony in Japan, an e-book reader that weighs as much as a thick paperback, measures roughly 20 by 13 centimetres, and sells for ¥41,790. And oh yes it uses linux.

It is possible to create your own ebook from ASCII or Unicode UTF-16 content thanks to the linux makelrf utility. Basically you can now get a memory stick, mount it under linux and pass your project gutenburg books to the Librie.

Depending on how the Librie hardware is mapped to the device
model, it probably won't be a simple port to get XPDF to work on the Librie hardware -- the ebook reader probably does its own rendering to a framebuffer interface, as it does on the PC.

Issues that the users have seen:

* The E Ink display shows a faint "ghost image" of the previous page.
You can see it on the picture at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sony_Librie_EBR_1000.jpg
(near the text "Lisa Vogt") It doesn't really bother most people though

* It's slow to power up. Takes around 30 seconds until you are back
reading where you left off. Also, is shuts down after while
It's also a bit slow to turn pages - around 1 second - only slightly
annoying.

* The buttons aren't very good

* The DRM issue of course. There's still no way to get nice, rich
hypertext on the device (searchable and with links, images and
sounds).

So - no major hardware issues

Japanese related complaints
* The user interface is japanese only for now. This includes the windows
software, the manuals, sony support websites, everything.

* The lid is on the wrong side (Japanese style - you can take it off or fold it to the back though)

A nice guide has been put together for the device.

Paul Graham on why USA is so ugly

Hacker Paul Graham has an interest article on why the US is so ugly. I think it has more to do with automobile culture than he credits.

Water Lilies 1906 Monet

Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio streams on your Linux box

I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.

First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command

1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv
(this will give you a file called “cores” in your home-directory)

2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)

3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)

However this process core dumped on realplayer recorder over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.

Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.

First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.

Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/

After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable ... it allows you to record the output audio stream of ... and line out jacks on the sound card.

vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav

I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html.

Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0: /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in /usr/lib when it was in /usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.

Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/, which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the .m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC and CBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.

Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s /dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 -
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &

Things to get working...
1) streaming directly to ogg with no intermediary wav step.
2) see if I can get this running from a cron job...

Whats left?

Iran, Iraq and the Media

I watched Control Room (2004) last night. I think it is a must see which questions the journalistic myths of "objectivity" and "impartiality".

And it made me think of this very interesting quote from Cringley about an attack he witnessed in the iran iraq war.

That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

...

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Fascinating Entry

Adam Bowsworth, one of the founders of BEA has posted a very interesting speech arguing for simplicity with computers. Worth a glance.

Did IE for Mac use khtml from linux/kde?

I ran into quite a strange bug on a website where an image map wasn't working in safari on mac and konqueror in linux. Which makes sense since they both use the same html rendering engine. Apparently IE for mac has exactly the same issue (I tested it to make sure). Is it possible that Microsoft used a bit of linux in their browser for mac? It compiles with visual studio so I wouldn't be surprised.

Most requested things for the Linux Desktop

There have been a few articles recently on slashdot, osnews here are a summary of the main requests

Sound - better mixing support, no more blocking of sounds	dmix was mentioned. I have this problem with my old soundblaster. One user suggests using lsof /dev/dsp. Another use:  something like 74% of the sound cards is mass or semi-mass circulation do not support hardware mixing in linux, and dmix is a cludge. how about a standard software mixer build into the alsa system, which only deactivates when their is a hardware mixer available.
Better ACPI support	Multiple users complain of this. Some bioses are buggy.
Various applications - Access, Video editing,	Sure. php + mysql (phpmyadmin) as an access replacement. OpenOffice 2.0 will have mysql integration. For video editing perhaps a mac is better right nowunless you want high end.

 
List 1
 
# 1.Windows Network Neighborhood visibility and UNIX/Linux visibility in the same panel.
ubuntu has this.
# 2.Active Directory password management which includes single sign-on and password expiration policies.
Yes - may be difficult
# 3.Interoperability with Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000.
OWA
# 4.Font compatibility with Microsoft Office and Openoffice.org and/or StarOffice.
proprietary - don't hold your breath
# 5.Windows Terminal Server clients using RDP out of the box for home grown applications and special Windows applications.
rdesktop works
# 6.Ability to click on a file in a Windows or Samba share and initiate the associated application.
kde works find as does gnome
# 7.Device management for hardware compatibility.
Mandrake has this
# 8. Compatible Windows Media player Codecs.
proprietary - but available
 


List 2
 
1. A *reliable* graphical FTP client. gFTP is buggy (I almost buggered up some osnews ftp files once while trying upload using drag-n-drop), Nautilus/vfs doesn't cut it, and KBear looks really ugly and uneeded busy (and hasn't been updated for over a year).

try firefox. ncftp works fine for me. anyway I think it should be done in nautalis or konqueror

2. Windows Media & QuickTime. Sorry, but I need my regular dosage of movie trailers. Real Player works on Linux, but I need QT and WMV/WMA too (and please don't suggest the windows-codecs package for use with VLC/Xine/Mplayer and their browser plugins as these hardly work with what's out there).

Proprietary - don't hold your breath
 
3. Audio & Video support for AIM/iChat, Y! & MSN in Gaim or Kopete (I need a multi-protocol app to handle these). I have three webcams here, I gotta use them. Gaim-vv is still alpha quality, and it isn't really part of Gaim's official line.
 
Proprietary - don't hold your breath. Skype works fine and is included in a couple distros.

4. Alsa needs to fix their architecture and/or drivers to automatically include a software mixer if the hardware doesn't have one. There are a gazillion of PCs (and especially laptops) out there with Intel/Via AC97 onboard sound cards that don't support hardware mixing. For these machines, Linux will only serve sound to one application at a time. Using the "dmix" software mixing plugin only satisfies Gstreamer & ESD apps, XMMS and Mplayer (all after tweaking their default settings to use the new "default" virtual Alsa "device"), but there are so many other apps that are not configurable as they use their own OSS/Alsa backend that simply won't even load sometimes, or just won't play any sound (mind you, the "aoss" trick only works with Real Player).
This situation is disgraceful considering that we are in 2004. This is not 1993 with Windows 3.1 and Sound Blaster, people. The Alsa Project should find an automatic solution to this huge problem that degrades the Linux experience down to the floor. Remember, these Via/Intel on board sound cards are everywhere these days. At least 2 out of my 8 PCs here have the problem with Linux (which is not a problem at all with Windows/BeOS btw).

Issue for many people
 
5. A good home video editor. Kino is closer than others, but still not there yet, plus it's easily crashable.
 
Maya

6. A simpler interface for Gimp. Something like PaintShopPro's. Trying to do some basic image editing with Gimp is a nightmare. PSP's and Photoshop Element's interfaces are much more intuitive for simple stuff, Gimp's is simply not.

Sure - actually should be a simple project.

7. Easier wi-fi/bluetooth configuration and ability to easily "create networks" with them (share internet connection with other wi-fi or bluetooth devices). Currently this is a lot of hard core unix command-line work on any distro. Even Mac OS X only makes it easy for Wi-Fi, but not for IP over Bluetooth.

Couple of distros have this working now. Wifi needs work.

8. Library developers should not break their APIs too often. There's nothing more nerve wrecking than trying to satisfy deps by compiling them, and realize that your app doesn't compile because it needs this or other specific version of a library/header. Yuk.

The cost of progress. Actually I think it is getting better.
 
9. Better and more reliable ACPI support. Currently my ATi-based laptop does not awake with any distro I tried (and recent kernels with supposedly "fixed" acpi).
 
Agreed

10. Better PalmOS and PocketPC synchronization software that work with the latest models and software (I got a new Clie). Something like "The Missing Sync" available for Mac.

J-Pilot works fine for me.

User 3

(1) Not really your average "desktop" user issue, but a decent IDE. I love vim as much as the next Unix-head, but at the end of the day, it's just a text editor. Anjuta doesn't cut it...development is stalled, even though I hear there is some kind of 2.0 "in the works"

Eclipse, kdeveloper?

(2) Get Gpdf working properly. I read a lot of technical documents and even though Xpfd does work, it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the desktop and it's interface way too spartan.

Agreed. kpdf works ok.

(3) Get wxWidget library packages updated using gtk+ 2.x. There are a lot of utilities that use wxWidgets and just look like ass with the default gtk+1.2 build. Ubuntu seems to be pretty bleeding-edge and it still ships with wxWidgets built with gtk+1.2

Agreed. Mandrake 10.1 does I believe.

Two and three are minimal issues. One is a much bigger issue.

Your next desktop may weigh 14 ounces

# 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe
# 20GB hard drive (shock-mounted)
# 256MB DDR RAM
# Weight: 14 ounces
# 800 x 480 W-VGA 5" transflective display (indoor/outdoor readable)
# 3D accelerated graphics with 8mb video RAM
# QWERTY thumb keyboard with mouse buttons and TrackStik®
# 802.11b wireless
# Bluetooth® wireless
# 4-pin FireWire® (1394)
# USB 1.1
# 3.5mm stereo headphone jack (supports stereo headphone or mono headset plus optional multimedia controller)
# Microphone

Apparently the thing can run linux. Would make a good desktop replacement if it had a bit more ram. This could be the ultimate cellphone/blackberry killer if

A) it could use traditional cell phone networks (GPRS)
B) Battery could last for a business day (or it has wake on call)

http://www.oqo.com/

Playing economic chicken with Japan and China

The US government is playing chicken with East asian countries mercantalistic policies. Eventually they will capitulate - the question is how much pain are they willing to bear?

From the economist:

By the end of last year, Asian central banks held $1.89 trillion of foreign reserves, the vast bulk of them in dollars. If these reserves lost value, Asian economies would suffer an almighty capital loss in domestic-currency terms. A recent study by the New York Federal Reserve counted the costs. If the Chinese yuan were to appreciate by 10% against the dollar (and other reserve currencies), China would suffer a capital loss worth almost 3% of GDP, the study found. If the won rose by 10%, South Korea would suffer similarly. The toll would be even greater in Singapore (10% of GDP) and Taiwan (8%).

To avert such an appreciation, Asian central banks would have to amass ever greater holdings of dollars. But this would only expose them to greater capital losses down the road. Alternatively, they might seek to avoid the consequences of a dollar fall, by diversifying into other reserve currencies, such as the euro. But that would only bring the dollar crashing down all the more quickly. In other words, Asian central banks are caught in an awkward dilemma: either they try to break the dollar’s fall, or they try to escape from underneath its collapse.

Will the US currency collapse bring a recession? I have a feeling that it will collapse as soon as one or two of the countries move to stem their potential losses.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3372405

Firefox/Gecko as a KDE QWidget

Zack Rusin has hacked up Gecko to run natively on kde. . Hopefully one of the distributions (Suse/Mandrake) will now stepup to the plate and get the integration done so that konqueror can use it when rendering web pages.