handyfloss

Apparently the online radio service my (formerly?) beloved [[last.fm]] was providing will no longer be free in the future, according to a recent official blog entry. Due to marketing/commercial/licensing decisions, the service will remain free of charge in the UK, Germany and the USA. Subscribers in the rest of the world will have to pay 3 euros per month.

In principle, I couldn’t care less for online music. I exclusively listen to my private collection, and only use last.fm to publish the list of tracks I listen to. However, I have a couple of thoughts about it.

The first one is that I think that charging web users according to location should be made obsolete. In Internet each person is just that: a person, an individual, a user. A site could ask me what my preferred language is, to interact better with me (and I could answer whatever, true or false), but my nationality, religion or race should be irrelevant. So much talk about “globalization”, and they only use it when it suits them. For example the work market is “globalizable”, but Internet is not.

My second thought is that they have been forced to charge money to their users because they have to pay for the right of broadcasting licensed music. My position? Fuck them. Yes, seriously, screw paying for the broadcasting rights! I am seriously fed up with the morons in the music (and film) industry, trying to control the uncontrollable. If I were Last.fm, or a radio station in general, I would broadcast just [[Creative Commons]] music, such as that at [[Jamendo]]. If you are an artist and want me to broadcast your music, then you should pay me, not the other way around. However, if you provide me with your music for free, I might broadcast it for free, too. Quid pro quo.

I think that radio broadcast of music, or internet sharing, or the CD market, should be completely free of charge (or, in the case of physical formats like CDs, charge just for the price of the physical medium). The musicians should see this forms of broadcast as advertising. The distribution of their music should be as wide as possible, to make them as famous as possible, so that the revenue they get by doing actual work (like performing live) is maximized.

But, hey, that’s just my view. What can I do with an industry that asks me to either comply or fuck off? Well, I guess that we, the clients/users should be asking that to the industry, not the other way around. I certainly try to.

Religion ain’t bad. At least, it isn’t bad if the believer doesn’t try to impose her views upon others. My faith is harmless if I keep it to myself. Because, when did, for example, a good old praying hurt anyone?

Apparently, the answer is August 6, 2005, when the pilots of the Tuninter Flight 1153 decided to pray instead of following the security protocol in the event of fuel starvation. Sixteen people died.

Obviously it would be unfair to say that they died because of the praying. But it would be safe to assume that following the protocol instead of dumping the controls and praying could have made for a smoother landing, probably reducing the death toll.

I noticed that after my second eeebuntu install (see a previous post for a why to this reinstall), my Eee PC was a wee bit more noisy. Most probably it has always been like that, but I just noticed after the reinstall.

I put some sensor output in my [[Xfce]] panel, and noticed that the CPU temperature hovered around 55 degrees C, and the fan would continuously spin at around 1200 rpm. I searched the web about it, and found out that usually fans are stopped at computer boot, then start spinning when temperature goes up. This is logic. The small catch is that when the temperature in the Eee PC goes down, the fan does not stop automatically. This means that the fans are almost always spinning in the long run.

I searched for methods to fix that, and I read this post at hartvig.de. From there I took the idea of taking over the control of the fans, and making them spin according to the current temperature. For that, I wrote the following script:

#!/bin/bash

TEMFILE=/proc/eee/temperature
FANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_speed
MANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_manual

# Get temperature:
TEMP=`cat $TEMFILE`

# Choose fan speed:
if [ $TEMP -gt 65 ]
then
  SPEED=90
elif [ $TEMP -gt 60 ]
then
  SPEED=60
elif [ $TEMP -gt 55 ]
then
  SPEED=30
else
  SPEED=0
fi

# Impose fan speed:
echo 1 > $MANFILE
echo $SPEED > $FANFILE

The file /proc/eee/fan_manual controls whether fans are under manual (file contains a “1”) or automatic (file contains a “0”) control. File /proc/eee/fan_speed must contain an integer number from 0 to 100 (a percent of max fan speed).

I am running this script every minute with cron, and thus far it works OK.

Did I say “bimonthly” in my last report? Mmm, that was 3 months ago… You can read an intro for my Linux World Domination project in this May 2008 post.

As usual D2D means “days to domination” (the expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from the present date), and DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report. CLP means “current Linux Percent”, as given by last logged data, and DD means domination day (in YYYY-MM-DD format).

As promised, today I’m showing the plots for POEM@home, in next issue Prime@home.

Number of hosts percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Accumulated credit percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Yes, [[FLOSS]] also has its quirks and problems, and I am going to rant about some of them, that I run into the last week.

Problem 1: fsck on laptops

The reader might know that Linux comes with a collection of file system checkers/fixers, under the name fsck.* (where * = ext2/3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs…). When one formats a new partition (or tunes an existing one), some parameters are set, as for example in what circumstances fsck should be run automatically (you can always run it by hand). The typical setting is to run the command on each partition (just before mounting it) every N times it is mounted, or every M days.

It is also set that if a filesystem is not shut down cleanly (e.g., by crashing the computer or directly unplugging it), fsck will be run automatically on next boot (hey, that’s so nice!).

However, here’s the catch: on laptops, and with the aim of saving power, fsck will (tipically) not run automatically when on batteries. This seems a great idea, but you can imagine an scenario where it fails: shut down the laptop uncleanly, then power it up on batteries, and… voilà, you are presented with a system that seems to boot, but gives a lot of problems, the X don’t work… because the disk was corrupt, and wasn’t fixed on boot.

When this happened to me, I fixed it by booting while plugged. In principle you could also boot on single user mode, then chose “Check the filesystem” in the menu you will be presented (I’m talking about Ubuntu here), and fix the problem, even on batteries. But still, it’s annoying. IMHO fsck should run after unclean shutdowns, no matter being plugged or on batteries.

Problem 2: failed hibernate can seriously screw your system

I tried [[Hibernate (OS feature)|hibernating]] my laptop (a feature I keep finding problems with), but it was taking too long, and I was forced to shut it down using the power button. This, in itself, is a serious issue, but I could live with it.

But what I can’t live with is that after the event, I had no way of booting back! I tried all I could, and finally had to reinstall the OS. I am the one whom it happened to, and I still find it hard to believe: Linux so fucked up that you have to reinstall. I thought reinstalling belonged to the Windows Dark Ages!

Problem 3: faulty SD card

Since the problems tend to come together, it’s no surprise that I came across this error when trying to reinstall the machine borked with previous problem. The thing is that I was using a SD card as installation media, burning the ISO into it with [[UNetbootin]]. The burning didn’t burp any error, but the installation failed, usually (but not always) on the same point.

After minutes (hours?) of going crazy, I burned the ISO into another SD card, and it worked like a charm.

My complain is not that the SD was faulty, which I can understand (hardware fails). What I am angry at is the fact that I checked (with the aforementioned fsck command) the FS in the card many times, and I reformatted it (with mkfs) many more times, and Linux would always say that the formatting had been correct, and that all checks where fine. I understand that things are sometimes OK, sometimes KO. I just want to know when is which!

I am attending the EGEE User Forum congress I have mentioned before, and we just had a talk delayed 5 minutes because of some stupid software problem.

The speaker had his talk in [[PDF]] format, really standard and portable. The organizers provided him with a Windows machine, with Acrobat Pro installed (apparently). He tried to open the file with it, but it turns out the license for Acrobat had expired, so the computer refused to open the file. How horribly full of shit is that? There are thousands of free (and/or freeware) programs out there to read PDFs, so why was the poor speaker forced to use another computer just for the task? This would have never happened, obviously, had the organizers been using free software.

I just posted about the abundance of laptops in the conference I am attending this week. Now I feel like comenting about my experience with the Asus eeePC 901 I acquired some weeks ago.

I have seen a couple other eeePCs, a black 9xx one, and a 7xx one. Apart from these, most other computers are laptops, not [[netbooks]]. I actually expected to find more, and for a plethora or reasons. There are some pretty small Vaios around, but only they compete in terms of size and weight with the eeePC. Not even the Macs. Not even the MacBook Airs that I have seen. Yes, the screen of the eeePC is tiny, but I would hate carrying around those monsters just to have a big screen on the road.

Secondly, my battery can last for 6h of work. Since I only use it during the breaks, and intermittently during the talks (closing the lid to suspend it when not in use), I can easily use it the whole day without plugging it at all. Other people can’t live w/o plugs. In 3.5h this morning, I spent less than 30% of the battery.

Thirdly, there is the price. I would expect that the Vaios I mention above cost easily 5-6 times more than my sub-300-euro jewel. The other laptops are probably cheaper, but still in the range 2-3x the price of my laptop. This is not negligible! I have no functionality missing, I can do everything the others do, but at a fraction of the price, a fraction of the space in my bag, and at a fraction of the weight on my back when transporting, and knees on using.

Right now I’m in the 4th EGEE User Forum/OGF25 conference being held in Catania, Sicily.

I have some random thought to write down, and my lately little-attended blog seems the right place to do so.

Random thought of the moment: everyone, I mean every boy and girl and their pets, has a laptop. Everyone listens to talks with a laptop in their knees. Also, an amazing fraction of these (from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3, maybe) are Macs. The Linux machines are also relatively abundant, although a sad majority of laptops seems to run Windows.

Might this mean that techies favor Apple? Maybe it just means that geeks can also be posh, as shown by the equally high amount of iPhones I’ve seen around.