Categories
Audio Linux

Another Mention

Well, a second mention of my name happened today, in as many weeks, out there on the Internet. And this one really surprised me. The guys at LugRadio mentioned me in the introduction to their latest episode (Season 2, Episode 7, 17 Jan 2005). LugRadio is a bi-weekly Internet “radio” show focusing on Linux and Open Source issues, produced by four guys in the UK. And it’s really a lot of fun to listen to.

It came about like this. I was reading various blogs of the LugRadio presenters one day, and I came across the blog of one of their regular listeners, Schwuk. His blog alerted me to the existence of the book Free as in Freedom which I started reading (see this earlier post of mine for the story). This pleased me enough to fire off an email to Schwuk to thank him for the tip. In the email I mentioned that I was a LugRadio listener, just so he would have an idea where I came from and why I was reading his blog. He must have passed this information on to the LugRadio guys, telling them that they have a listener in China. This impressed them enough, I figure, to talk about the email I sent. They had a good time making fun of Canada and saying hello in Chinese. [So good job guys. You really surprised me.] I’ll have to send an email directly to them this time, to tell them a little more about myself.

If I get around to it, I’ll extract the clip for you, my readers, and post it here. In the mean time, head over to www.lugradio.org and download their latest episode. If you are at all interested in Linux or Open Source, I highly recommend this show. They give lots of great information and discuss the issues with plenty of opinion, and they have a great time doing it. In this same episode, they do a great interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu Linux, which is highly intelligent and informative. It’s a great episode, and not just cause I’m mentioned in it!

In any case, I wonder why I’m getting all this attention all of a sudden…

Categories
Tech

Open Tsunami Alert System (OTAS)

I’ve started working with a Computer Scientist named Charles Martin on the Open Tsunami Alert System (OTAS). The call-to-arms which spawned this particular project was the following column by Robert X. Cringely:

Go read it. I hope to be able to use my data processing skills to work on the Tsunami detection part of the system. The plan is to use Internet-available seismic data to issue alerts to people’s computer desktops and mobile phones.

Cringely mentions me and Charles by name in a later column, which is way cool, but also a big responsibility. Yikes! It will be an interesting and challenging experience for me. Many people across the Internet are coming forward to offer their services as well. Now to go learn more about seismic data and seismic processes…

Categories
Music

CBC Radio available in Ogg Vorbis format

This is cool. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is offering CBC Radio 1 (like AM talk radio) and CBC Radio 2 (like FM music shows) feeds on the Internet in Ogg Vorbis format. What’s that?, you ask, and Why should I care? Ogg is an audio compression format, like MP3 but better quality, and it is completely free, open, and unpatented. This means developers of audio players (both hardware and software) do not need to pay royalties to be able to use this format. It also means you can listen to CBC Radio on older hardware or on machines not running Windows (like Linux and FreeBSD).

Many Internet radio feeds force their users to use proprietary formats like Real Audio or Windows Media, so it is refreshing to find that CBC is also offering Ogg Vorbis. And it sounds great. I’m listening right now, and the feed is 32 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo Ogg. Happy Listening!

Categories
Tech

Want a Gmail account?

Google’s Gmail accounts are by invitation only, and I have 7 invitations to give out. So if you want one, send me an email and I’ll give you one.

Categories
China Palm

The Joy of Geek

I was eating in Grandma’s Kitchen last night and I met a cool guy from Seattle named Charles Kuai. He came up to me to ask about my Palm Wireless Keyboard as I was working on email after dinner. He has a Palm Tungsten W and was interested in buying such a keyboard. So, on my Palm, I quickly looked up the contact info I have for a PalmOne wholesale dealer here in Beijing, and handed it to Charles. Now if he actually had his Palm on him, I could have wirelessly “beamed” him the data. But alas, we had to resort to old fashioned pen and paper.

It was a fun encounter. And I made a new friend.

Categories
Astro Palm Python

Working with vCalendar

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I used my time to work on putting Moon phase information for the new year into my Palm’s calendar. I already have a Python script that will calculate the times of the phases of the Moon based on the algorithms found in Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms (2nd Ed., 1998). But I still needed a way to import this data into my Palm in an automated way. Last year, I did this by hand. Yuck! So I used the Palm Desktop application and the vCalendar file format for exchange of calendaring and scheduling information. I had never used the vCalendar format before, but I found the specifications online and soon modified my Python code to output into this format. Here’s an example of what I produced:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20050103T174530Z
SUMMARY:Last Quarter 01h45
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20050110T120238Z
SUMMARY:New Moon 20h02
END:VEVENT
...
END:VCALENDAR

Note that the times DTSTART are given in UTC (the “Z” is for “zulu”), but I wanted the event description to be in local time (8 hours ahead for China). Since China doesn’t observe daylight savings time, I could apply this +8 h correction into the Python code quite trivially.

If you want to see the code that I used to do this, just email me.

Categories
Philosophy Tech

Free as in Freedom

[Free as in Freedom (cover)]I started reading the book Free as in Freedom (2002), by Sam Williams last night, based on a tip from schwuk.com. The book’s subtitle reads, “Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software”, and the book is a biography of Stallman’s Life.

Stallman is a software-genius-turned-political-activist, responsible for the creation of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. His main tenet is that software should be free: free for the users of the software to use it, understand it, improve it, and share it. The “free” adjective does not refer to the monetary value of the software. It refers to liberty.

In this document, Stallman describes how he arrived at his philosophy:

When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking. But we did it more than most.

The AI Lab used a timesharing operating system called ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) that the lab’s staff hackers had designed and written in assembler language for the Digital PDP-10, one of the large computers of the era. As a member of this community, an AI lab staff system hacker, my job was to improve this system.

We did not call our software “free software”, because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program.

But outside of his lab, a dark practice of Non Disclosure Agreements and proprietary code was beginning. Stallman made the choice to re-create this community of resource sharing by creating the concept of free software, and he has worked towards building a computing environment of free software tools. These are known as the GNU Tools and have culminated in the GNU/Linux Operating System.

The thing that has struck me most about this history of free computing is the following passage from Chapter 4 of the biography:

Members of the tight-knit group called themselves “hackers”. Over time, they extended the “hacker” description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the “hacker ethic”. To be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if that’s what it took to write the best possible programs. Most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior. [Emphasis mine.]

Changing the world through software. That idea really speaks to me. I guess I never considered it before, but Stallman and his supporters have certainly done that. I’m discovering my heroes, and they’re turning out to be the great hackers.

Categories
Tech

Skype internet telephony

[Skype Me Button] I just signed up for Skype at www.skype.com. It’s a free service that lets you make computer-to-computer voice calls over the internet. For a low fee you can also make calls to regular phones. I’ll get Bruce to sign up and we can test out the quality over a China-to-Canada link. Then maybe I’ll get my Mom to try it out. My cousin Corinne, who’s living in Changsha, China, is using it to talk to her family every week. So maybe it’s got promise.

If you want to sign up and give it a try, you’ll need to know my Skype username: madphilosopher.ca

Categories
Speech Tech

Do you use Linux?

In an IT Conversations interview, publisher and open source advocate Tim O’Reilly talks about a paradigm shift taking place in software. To give an example of the failure to realize the new paradigm, he asks the question, “Do you use Linux?”. He makes the point that even if you use Microsoft Windows as your operating system, chances are that you use Google, and Google is running on Linux. Therefore you are a user of Linux. The point is that the PC no longer matters, nor does the operating system. Services that exist on the network such as Amazon, Google, eBay, etc. are becoming much more important than the software used to access them.

Have a listen to the following excerpt where he discusses this issue. (The full interview can be found here.)

Tim O’Reilly – Do you use Linux? (0.5 MB)

Categories
China General

Easy going at work this week

I got a pretty sweet deal at work this week. Basically, they had run out of work for me to do during this publishing cycle. So I got an unexpected vacation. I still went in to the office every morning to work on other projects, but I was able to take the afternoon off. This worked out well this week because of all the preparations for Christmas and for seeing Eydie off in the days to come. So one day, I was even able to take her to the Forbidden City.

So it’s been a great week. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m in a taxi on the third ring road, listening to Swing, and blogging while traffic moves along slowly. I’m on my way to Alpha Bakery to buy some dessert for tonight’s party at Ilse’s.