Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

I’ve had a very screwed up sleeping schedule the past few nights.  And I doubt I’ll be sleeping much tonight due to coffee and (second-hand) nicotine.  So I’ve been working on my blog a little bit, making sure my avatar (and gravatar) is up to date on a few sites and thinking of a project for the rest of the night.

A couple days ago I wrote a Community Membership proposal for OLPC.  This was merely a draft and I’ve gotten a few good responses from Mel and Cjl .  Tonight I am going to flesh out the proposal some more, and take their comments into account.  I will also be doing some work on speex-for-olpc which is more complicated than it sounds.  I will make updates here and via twitter as they happen.

I was looking through the changelog in the latest linux kernel for Ubuntu: 2.6.24-17.31 .  I didn’t see a lot that was terribly useful to me and my purposes, but I did notice a better CFS implementation for PulseAudio, which was needed.  I was having troubles with PulseAudio, in fact I’ve been having a lot of troubles with Pulseaudio, which is something I’ll talk about later.

One of the upstream changes that I thought was kinda nifty was the addition of more puppies!?

"* lguest: Add puppies which where previously missing."

As an aside, Linus Torvaldus may have been the commiter for said additional puppies .  But overall, I really have no idea what this means :(

Multi user wordpress is an amazingly awesome and powerful package.  It lets you run a blog hosting service like wordpress.com on your own.  Pretty cool tool for a community.

I’ve run into only one error tonight when setting up MU wordpress.  When I try to login the domain tries to redirect me to "cgi-system/wp-login.php" when it should just be "/wp-login.php".  Apparently this crops up (at Dreamhost in all examples) when you’re running PHP4 instead of PHP5 like you should be.

Move over to PHP5 and you should be ok.

Also, I must mention again that Dreamhost is the coolest web hosting company on the planet.  It was something like 4 AM where I and they are located when I asked them for a wildcard DNS mask.  They replied and had everything setup in ~20 minutes.

They also have a kick-ass referall program where I could make bank if I were link you to them right now.  But I’m not.  I’m just honestly really really in love with Dreamhost.

I finally found an email I’ve been searching for.  This email marks my first interaction with OLPC and my first attempt to get involved with OLPC Content.

Hello,
I work with the <snip>; a non-profit organization that
does history presentations on the middle ages for schools, libraries
and museums in the Pacific Northwest.  We do demonstrations and
lectures on historical arms, armor and combat of the middle ages and
renaissance (Western Martial Arts).

I have been hearing about the concept of a sub $200 laptop for
education for quite a while (Ballmer among others) and I find if a
fascinating concept.  So first of all kudos to your group at MIT.

I was wondering if you were planning on having any sort of educational
materials already loaded on the laptops.  Our organization has in the
past been asked to be part of educational materials, and we are
working towards publishing classroom materials of our own in the next
two years.

If your group were interested in a few sample history lessons as
demonstrations of what your laptop could do; perhaps we could supply
you with something both historical and visually interesting.

If you have some interest I can be contacted at <snip>

According to the OLPC Timeline, this email dates to before the XO was announced with Nicholas Negreponte and Kofi Annan Unfortunately, OLPC didn’t have Sj yet, so their response was less than thrilling.

Red Hat is our partner and is working on software. The participating
countries will also provide their own software.

Best wishes,

<snip (name removed)>

I could understand brushing me off at such an early phase in OLPC’s development.  But the reply was a bit silly all the same. :)

Rice Boy is a beautifully drawn webcomic about the adventure of it’s eponymous character, Rice-boy.  Or at least it was.  The final pages of this 411 page epic were posted last week.

Rice Boy is borderline childlike and simplistic, but it’s worthy all the same.  I will be buying the printed books when they are all available.

Goodbye Rice-boy, I’ve enjoyed your journey.

Wearable computing, I find it utterly facinating.  I wants one!  I’ve been designing a system for myself since about the age of 14.  Most recently I’ve been thinking of a low profile backpack / wrist screen platform.

I ran into this link via Makezine today.  It involves salving Prius hybrid batteries.  The formfactor of the battery says to me that it would fit perfectly in a backpack of some kind… and other than extreme voltages/current, they seem pretty safe chemically.  NiMH batterys are okish, not like LiON’s *shudder*.

Seriously, Grub is a boot to the head.

I rarely shut down my computer.  It’s linux, and is pretty low powered, so I don’t really have to.  Last night I did shut down my machine before I went to bed. I had been playing with and cleaning up my grub config last night.

For those of you who are new to Linux/Ubuntu Grub is the program that allows your computer to boot.  It’s pretty important. And I broke mine :(

And it turns out that it’s pretty hard to fix grub when you can’t boot your computer far enough to manipulate the grub configuration files.  There is a simple built in command line, but it’s pretty difficult to wrangle things in.

find /boot/v <–tab–>

The above command actually gives you a lot of really useful feed back, both in the tab completion and the result.  It *should* spit out something like (hd0,5) which equates to hda5.  My entry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst had (hd1,5) instead of (hd0,5).  And that’s what prevented me from booting.

Luckily I had a livecd handy to get online and diagnose and find that find / command.

So don’t touch grub unless you read up on the matter first.  Seriously.  It will kick you in the head.  With a boot…

Let me state this up front.  I hate PDF
’s.  I’ve worked in graphic design and print design blah blah blah.  And I’ve had to deal with every lame application’s specific intrepretation of PDF more times than I would like.

PDF’s don’t do well in web browsers, they are far larger than the componant text file, don’t really provide any security, are hard to flow text in (or out of), don’t work well with screen readers (depends), and very often are awful for professional CMYK printing.

Tonight, I discovered:

1. PDFs function roughly the same way in GNU/Linux as in the Windows world (weird)
2. That in FOSS there are AMAZINGLY powerful tools to do PDF’s

When I helping edit the release
notes for Hardy Heron (which were re-written in plain english?
) I found out that the latest version of Inkscape
could edit PDF’s natively I was estatic.  I have since used Inkscape (which I now love more than life itself) on a spree of projects.  Inkscape is FANTASTIC, download it now.

But Inkscape doesn’t handle image based PDF’s as well.  Image based PDF’s (probably a better name for them) are basically just a big scanned image, usually a series of documents that have been cramed into a .PDF and then emailed back and forth.  Working in real estate I’ve cleaned up an awful lot of these when they finally degrade beyond the point of legibility (at least it’s better than faxes).

Tonight I was forced to deal with the issue of an inproperly formatted scaned document (PDF) using only Free and Open Software!  It’s True!  And it CAN be done, quite handily I might add.

The scanned document at 300dpi (and quite awful quality I might add) was 145MiB and merely 6 pages of simple text.  Being in a hurry, I was able to 7zip the document down to about 9MiB and email it to myself back home.

Once home, I unzipped, and started poking at it with Inkscape.  Well inkscape didn’t quite know what to do with 6 pages, and doesn’t quite handle images natively.  So I fired up The GIMP to see what it would do with 145MiB of PDF.  The GIMP didn’t even hiccup.  It ate that pdf and spit out 6 .eps’ at 150dpi like they were nothing.  This cut the total filesize down to about 18MiB.

EPS’s are well and good.  But I need a single PDF to send.  So I use the pdftk (apt-get install pdftk) to convert and concatenate the six files.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=contract.pdf -dBATCH Contract1.eps Contract2.eps Contract3.eps Contract4.eps Contract5.eps Contract6.eps

That left me with a single file called contract.pdf.  That file? was only 700KiB in size. :D

…

There has to be an easier way to do this.  But all the same, I’m glad that I learned how to do it this way first.  Were I to do these in batches, The Gimp takes scripts very well, and I would likely even find a command line program (imagemagic?) that would do this even easier.

My blag software has been down for some time.  But it’s back now.

Newness?

I now live in ellensbouguise again, and am going to CWU.  I’m trying to finish my degree, eventually.  Degrees actually.

I’m going to be here for another month, and then to Boston for the summer.

More to come