We Should See Other Blogs

I used to use Ktorrent for downloading Linux ISOs and getting free music from Jamendo. It worked well, but suffered from a lot of overhead, as was a KDE application and had to load a whole bunch of extra components. Plus (and I’m being charitable here) DHT didn’t work quite as well as one might expect.

Now, changing software is a bit of a big deal. I had a lot of settings tweaked in Ktorrent to get it right to where I wanted. Yet, when I typed aptitude install deluge-torrent and ran the thing, I was P2P-ing in literally a minute or so.

From a functionality standpoint, Ktorrent had always been all right, but not amazing. It lacked certain things, one of which was a simple layout and a nice skin. Frankly, it looked like a KDE application, and that’s not a compliment. And while it got the job done, I was always looking out something more like uTorrent, which is the gold standard in Torrent apps.

Or was. Deluge has most of the features of Azureus (that bloated hunk of crap), is free and open source, runs on Unix and Apple and has an alpha build on Windows, has a plug-in architecture, is functional, lightweight, and pleasing on the eyes.

Deluge is, in my opinion, the new gold standard in Bittorrent software.

We got a new machine today — a very nice, sturdy piece of well-needed equipment, I might add — that everyone has been looking forward to for quite some time.

I walked into the shop to catch a glimpse of… the American flag. No, wait, two American flags. And what appeared to be bunting. All over our new machine.

Now, I’m no anti-American zealot. I love Americans as one might love one’s gun-toting, Bible-thumping, gas-guzzling, war-loving older brother. But I don’t want the flag plastered all over my workplace. We’re not that way in Canada.

It puzzles me to think of exporting something with your country’s flag plastered on the front. Sure, “Made in America” somewhere on the packaging is a nice touch, a sign of quality, perhaps even a testimony to decent engineering. Maybe a little flag somewhere near the ingredients. But on a stationary box that someone’s going to place in the middle of their shop? Isn’t that just a little… rude?

I made a little something tonight, as my wife looked on, giggling. You may judge for yourself what it is, as I believe it’s rather un-classifiable.

What? (MP3)
What? (OGG)

Using British slang that either sounds naughty in Canada, or doesn’t sound naughty when it should:

• Hey, can I bum a fag?
• Of course I like your son! He’s a proper little tosser, that one!
• This is my happy sack. Anything that makes me happy, I keep in here.

Every now and again I do online surveys for money (quite extensive surveys, I might add). I try to actually make it worth the survey’s while in that my opinions are rather precise: I’m not just clicking the first thing I see.

Yesterday, however, the survey I was taking dealt mostly with advertising. Had I seen such and such an advert? How about this one? Or that one?

I was mildly surprised; I hadn’t seen most of the adverts they set in front of my eyes, at least the recent ones. Then it struck me. I don’t see much advertising at all any more. With Adblock Plus installed on Firefox, I don’t see many internet ads, except Google’s, which are generally easy to ignore. What little television I watch is ad-free (and on a tangential note, it a pleasure to watch and not have narrative interruptions every ten minutes) thanks to the magic of various devices designed to do this. When I listen to the radio, I invariably tune in to 99.1 FM, which happens to be CBC Radio 1, and happens to contain no blatant advertising.

If I could figure out a way to block billboards and bus-side adverts and whatever arrives in my tech magazines, I would do that too.

Not that I don’t want creators of works to get paid for what they create. Far from it. Radiohead released In Rainbows for a choose-your-own-price and I paid about $8 for that. I would pay for commercial-free television, if I could receive only the shows I want, in the format I want, to watch when I want, on whatever machine I want. I’d micro-pay to view websites I enjoy (after all, I have about five sites I regularly visit, that’s all) without advertising present.

There’s something magnificently wrong with Total Advertising Awareness. You know, when you can recite off the top of your head ten different company slogans, can sing a bunch of different jingles, and talk to your friends about such and such a funny/insightful/pretty commercial advertisement. Ever wonder what that does to you? I do. I wonder if, now that I don’t see as many advertisements, I’ll watch my desire to constantly buy things go down. And I wonder if I’ll be able to opt out of other things as well, like Halloween and the rabid consumer frenzy that Christmas has become.

You could experiment on yourself, too. You don’t have to. But you could. You could try ridding your mind-space of as much advertising as possible, and then try to read the results. At the very least you’ll have more room in your head.

I just had to restart a Windows 2000 server. I would like to know why I had to restart the server, and I would like to know if there was any way to avoid doing so.

It seems at this point that,

• My knowledge of the subject is limited and there are real ways to diagnose problems such as these; or,
• There’s no real mechanism to diagnose problems, such as CLI output, logfiles, and the like.

It could very well be the first option there. It the meantime, it occurs to me that both our servers would probably be faster if we were running them on one Linux box (or Solaris, or BSD) under vitualisation.

Here’s a little something I composed in Notion. It’s fairly straightforward: violins, violas, cellos, basses, and a xylophone. I call it Brutus Comes Home. Please note that it’s not finished, it is in fact still in heavy development.

No longer three days! Now it’s just two. The breathless anticipation. There are release parties being set up all over the world, even one in Cairo.

Ubuntu 7.10 is almost here.

In the meantime Lifehacker has a nice look at the upcoming release. I found a few gems in here I hadn’t know about before, either. Such as automatic NTFS read/write, and the ability to change resolutions without using a terminal or restarting X.

While watching Boston Legal last night, I was disturbed by a particularly uninformed opinion. Not their usual flaming liberal bias — I can make my peace with that — but the inclusion of Steve Ballmer’s name in a list of innovators, along with the Woz and Steve Jobs. Mr Shore all but admitted they just wanted a list of people named “Steve”, but still. When has Steve Ballmer ever innovated anything? I can get on board with calling Paul Allen an innovator in some limited sense. Even Bill Gates.

But Ballmer? What?

I’m not trying to flame, but let’s at least include some real innovators, like — as much as I hate to say it — Richard Stallman, who literally changed software forever. Or John McCarthy, who invented LISP, among other things. Or Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much invented the internet.

Only three more days until Ubuntu Gutsy! That means integrated desktop effects with Compiz (spinning cube yay!), a graphical configuration tool for X (desperately needed), integrated desktop search (for that little search box in my SLED), and fast user switching (not useful for me).

I’m excited!