handyfloss

Yesterday I watched X-Men III: The Last Stand (X-Men III: La decisión final). It delivers what is expected: good action and a poor script, although the plot itself (“what happens”) is not that bad.

I have always thought that the most captivating idea of the X-Men series is the struggle of people that is “different” to fit in the society, and not to be segregated and prosecuted. This movie takes the idea a step further, because a mutant appears that puts fear into other mutants (much as mutants scare regular human beings), which, to me, should make them think on where the injust segregation ends and safety enforcemente begins… Thorny issue, now I think of it.

All in all, a good action movie, but don’t expect Macbeth.

Recently my friend L. drew my attention to a blog that had a nifty flash animation on a sidebar. That flash animation presented the visitor with a playlist of some songs, which she could play by clicking on them. Well the thing is called radio.blog, and can be downloaded from its homepage. BTW, it’s a Creative Commons software piece.

So, yes, I went ahead and implemented it in my blog… and the result is in the right hand side of this page.

Installation

You need to download the zip file you can find at the radio.blog site (direct link).

Unzipping that file will create a radio.blog.2.5/ directory, which contains a Instructions.txt file. Read it, because it is very simple and, of course, useful.

Basically, you will find two directories inside the main one: creat.sound/ and radio.blog/. The former can be used to place MP3 files into it, and then create RBS files making use of one of the BAT files therein (for MS Windows), and the latter is the directory that you have to place in your web server, because it contains the program itself (SWF and PHP files), along with the MP3 files you will upload.

Okay, so the first step is to convert the music into the RBS format. They include a (very simple) BAT file that can do the job if you’re on Windows (don’t sue me if it doesn’t work: I haven’t tried it), but whatever OS you are running, a RBS file is nothing more than a MP3 file renamed to .rbs. Yes, just that. However, the BAT files the makers give not only do that renaming: they also downsample the songs to 32 or 64 kbps. You can do it by hand using lame (toolame won’t work, because Layer II is not supported, only Layer III). The downsampling is desirable because, even though the quality goes down, so does the size, and it is crucial to make small files if we want a half-decent listening experience for our visitors. Myself, I use a 48 kbps bitrate. Important note: make sure the resulting MP3 has a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz (I think the default is to resample to 24 kHz, which will make the song sound like The Chipmunks singing it, because the player assumes it’s 44.1 kHz).

Once we have a bunch of RBS files, we will have to put them into the radio.blog/sounds/ directory and upload the whole radio.blog/ dir to our site. Next, you have to copy the code below into the source of the web page you want to put the radio into (e.g. the template of the blog):

<iframe src="http://YOUR_URL/radio.blog/index.php" name="radio" scrolling="no" frameborder=0 width=220 height=320></iframe>

In the code above, substitute YOUR_URL with the URL of the site you downloaded the radio.blog/ dir to.

Creating the RBS files

From WAV:

lame --abr 48 --resample 44.1 infile.wav -o outfile.rbs

where “48” is the desired bitrate. You can tune it up (better quality) or down (smaller size).

From OGG:

Convert to WAV,

oggdec infile.ogg -o infile.wav

and then, like above for WAV.

Or, in one step:

oggdec infile.ogg -o - | lame --abr 48 --resample 44.1 - -o outfile.rbs

From MP3:

lame --mp3input --abr 48 --resample 44.1 infile.mp3 -o outfile.rbs

Music I have uploaded

Due to the restrictive copyrights most mainstream songs bear, it is legally tricky to broadcast them at a place like this. Not only that, but I also refuse to give free publicity to a bunch of sobs who assume I am a criminal, and treat me like one, limiting my rights to access, share and spread their music.

However, there is little to fear. There are places like Jamedo, where all sorts of musicians publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, so that anyone can freely download, listen, copy, share and spread it any way they feel like, with the only price of acknowledging the author. This is the way to go, and this is the kind of artists I want to support. All the music you’ll find at my site, is, therefore, Creative Commons music.

Last night I went to see the movie Chaos (Caos).

It is a decent movie, with some thriller ingredients, following the “misterious” bank robbery theme I also saw in Inside man (Plan oculto). Here the plot is, maybe, more developed, but less perfect. It is not evident why some things happen, and the inclusion of chaos theory into the plot is irrelevant, but it has the makings of a good thriller, in which details fit together as the movie goes on. Not perfectly, but they do fit.

As a little warning, do not expect incredible amounts of action, just because Statham and Snipes are starring. It has some action, but the main dish is the plot itself.

Barring some holes in the script, and the usual unbelievable bits (some explosions, some bad guys escaping miraculously… you know, those things), I’d say it is well worth watching.

Many people wonder why, Linux and FLOSS being so good, is Windows the most used OS around. Generally, this leads them to argue that, since Windows is so popular, it must be because it’s better. After all, we the users are not stupid, are we?

No, we are not. Not even Windows users are :^)

The reasoning above rests on the premise of fair competition, which is not the case in the software market nowadays. No, it is not, and I mean it. Consider the following example:

There is a bicycle maker A, who makes A bicycles. She has no competition, no rivals in the market, hence A bicycles get very popular.

When the market is saturated, maker B comes into town, and starts producing B bicycles, which are much better.

No matter how monopolystic A was: in a short time, B will dominate the market, due to her better product.

This example is a good one of a fair market. But now consider another case:

We have maker A producing car A. Now, a car needs gasoline! As car maker A grows, gasoline A providers grow in parallel. Soon enough, all the cars in the town are A, and all the gas stations serve A gasoline.

Now, if an independent car maker B comes to town, and wants to produce B cars… she’s out of luck! B cars need B gasoline, but ALL THE GAS STATIONS ARE A!!

No matter how hard the newcomer tries, B cars will never be popular, because the potential buyers would have nowhere to get fuel. Conversely, someone could start providing B gasoline, and compete with A gas stations… but, how on earth!? B gas stations will always bankrupt, because ALL THE CARS ARE A!!

This is, ladies and gentlemen, the present situation in the software industry: a car/gasoline lock-in. We have to realize that Microsoft is trying hard to push this lock-in down our throats, because creating lock-ins is a most succesfull, albeit immoral and barely legal, marketing strategy. When forced lock-ins pervert the free market, legal actions have to be taken by governments… and that’s part of the reasons why we see Microsoft day after day in the courts.

Does Microsoft really force lock-ins unto us? Let’s consider some car/gas pairs these “gentlemen” try to enforce us:

• HTML only IE understands / IE
• DOC, XLS, PPS / MS Office
• WMV, WMA / Media Player
• Hardware with windows-only drivers / MS Windows OS
• Windows-only games and software / MS Windows OS

Remember: each time you create a web page (say, with Frontpage) that can be properly viewed only with IE, you are supporting the Microsoft monopolistic lock-in. Each time you surf the web with IE, and ask a web administrator to modify her page so that you can view it with your flawed broser, you are supporting the MS lock-in. Each time you send someone a DOC file, instead of a PDF or an ODF OpenOffice.org document, each time you share some video or audio in a Windows proprietary format, each time you buy a windows-only TV card or Wireless card… each time you are surrendering your liberty to the Microsoft lock-in.

And this is bad even if you are a die-hard Windows fanboy, because the sad fact is, this lock-ins only benefit the locking vendor, not the locked client. It is a way of gaining power upon us, to enable them to charge as much as they want for a product of as low a quality as their self-confidence allows (which is much).

Fight them back, and use the alternatives: Firefox and w3c-compliant HTML code, OpenOffice.org and ODF-compliant documents, MPEG and Theora for videos (WMV deprecated, closed and under patents), OGG Vorbis for music (MP3 deprecated, under patents), JPEG and PNG for images (GIF deprecated, under patents)

I read (via Kriptópolis) that Microsoft has partially corrected a bug that caused the batteries of some laptops to run out too fast. However, if we are to believe the source of the new (The Register), MS only fixed one of the three causes of power drain.

Only MS could make an OS that affected hardware adversely… Sad.

There was a time when Windows users would say there weren’t games that run under Linux.

There was a time when Windows users would say that Linux was technically inferior.

Later they would end up accepting that it was indeed technically superior, but that it would not catch on people because it was difficult to install and use.

Now, with distros like SUSE or Ubuntu, which are easier to install than Windows, they resort to saying that Windows does and will reign in the desktop, because they have had years of development, whereas Linux “consists on sucky black terminals with fosforescent text”.

OK, check about XGL on Linux. Both Linux and Windows (Vista) are able to move and resize windows with transparencies, shades, and elasticity effects… now, you can read here (Spanish), how a guy opened 17 simultaneous High Definition videos with transparencies and real time shades on his Linux Box, while Windows would barely cope with one or two. Check the videos in that page, and think again about Linux and his “sucky black terminals”.

Reading FayerWayer, I found a reference to a comparison between these three OSs made by someone called Jasjeet Sekhon. As with any benchmark, it is only valid for the context it applies to, so take it cautiously, and read the original story for more details.

The benchmarks used by Jasjeet Sekhon are two calculations with some software called R Project for Statistical Computing. The results are good for Linux (of course), and bad for… OSX!! Yes, madams et monsieurs, even Windows beats MacOSX.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Crash, and I have to say that I liked it a lot. The plot is very good, and the events flow naturally.

What I liked most was that the characters were, albeit sketchy (because there are many, and there’s no time for more development), quite more complex than your average black-or-white hero/villain type nowadays. There aren’t really good guys and bad guys. There’s racist idiots, but also people with prejudices learning to overcome them, apparently racist people acting as heroes, ethnic minorities clashing among them, appart from with white people, and “gangsta bros” becoming samaritans.

A great movie, really.

Don’t know about the reader, but I keep discovering little nifty tricks for LaTeX, Perl or Linux administration, only to hit my head against the wall some time later, when I encounter the same problem again, but don’t remember the trick, and have to invent a solution again…

Nevermore!

Yeah, I don’t have a better place to put my tricks. Got a problem?

Let’s move on to the tricks:

Q: How do I move a text X mm down (or up)?

A: Producing space between two text blocks is easy:

text1
\vspace{Xmm}
text2

Producing some space before any text in the page is more complicated, because the following will just not work:

\vspace{Xmm}
text2

However, we can force LaTeX to do our will substituting “text1” with a blank space “\ “:

\ \vspace{Xmm}
text2

Q: How do I produce a blank page?

A: This is something that should seldom be done, because paging is automatically controled, but some day you might need it.

To achieve this, you cannot simply put a \clearpage (or \newpage, or \pagebreak), because it only works after some text in the page. Anyway, we can use the trick above, and do:

% This is page 1, with a normal use of \newpage:
blah-blah-blah\newpage

% This is page 2, blank:
\ \clearpage

% This is page 3, normal:
blah-blah-blah

If we want a completelly blank page (i.e. without even page numbering or headers), use:

\thispagestyle{empty}\ \clearpage

I read in BoingBoing that at least one of the 5 finalists to the 2005 Hugo best science-fiction novel award has published his work (Accelerando) under the Creative Commons.

Yes, free to download legally. Yes, a novel that is among the finalists for an international prize, won by people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card or J.K. Rowling in 2001 for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.