(By the way: Linode, my VPS host, seems to be awesome.)

My chat client Irssi combined with OpenSSH, GNU Screen and Bitlbee provides me with hugely powerful social infrastructure in the form of continuous conversations that can be reached with any SSH client. Add logging and basic Unix tools to the mix and you have a silly fast and simple way of finding stuff you’ve discussed. In other words: my IRC/Live/Jabber logs are important works of reference and must be kept up to date with the system locale.

I failed to find any directly suitable or functional shell one-liners for this operation, until Thomas handed me something that worked for me.

The conversion command later on this page converts all files in Irssi’s default log location, ~/irclogs, and its subdirectories from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8.  The conversion is performed on the files themselves using recode in their current location. Don’t run with scissors, please do yourself a favor by making a backup copy of your precious logs. The most obvious tool for that is perhaps:

"cp -r ~/irclogs ~/backup_irclogs"

This is Thomas‘ conversion command:

"find ~/irclogs/* | while read i; do echo "Converting $i"; recode ISO-8859-15..UTF-8 "$i"; done"

Stig later informed me about find having exec capablities, but since I’m lazy and all that, you’ll have to optimze the above version yourself.

I’ve always found Twitter to be a very interesting concept, but I don’t use the service myself. I find its minimalism compelling, but its terrible at representing conversations or replies. Jaiku on the other hand has a few very appealing mobile location centric features.

As with any blogging systems, it’s the content that makes the whole thing worth looking at. Some really entertaining writers are currently using Twitter to post hilarious one-liners – I follow these with RSS like I’d do with any blog, without being a registered user.

I use Facebook’s status feature in an almost Twitter-like fashion, mainly because almost everyone I know already is into Facebook. I’m very disappointed in FB’s walled garden-approach: status messages or replies to these, along with other potentially useful things, like posted links, don’t have obvious unique urls or archive views you can browse back to after some time, and are pretty much not reachable from the outside. It is, however possible to get RSS feeds both of your own and your friend’s status messages.

As my FB status messages really are something I consider a semi-daily writing exercise, I do want them archived. I save my status messages in a WordPress install I set up together with Feedwordpress and Feedburner, but this doesn’t of course save any comments someone may post on FB.

What I’m trying to get at is that microblogging, as a concept, needs to become more mature and standardized, or it will lag behind like instant messaging has done for a decade or so. OpenMicroBlogging and it’s reference implementation, Laconica have the potential to revolutionize public discourse on the internet beyond what’s possible with today’s already interesting services. Proprietary platforms such as Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook have the advantages of large user bases and cell phone connectivity but they really need to use something like OpenMicroBlogging protocol for cross-service communication to become really useful.

For now, there aren’t really any proper sources in English, but for those willing to do some guesswork, Google’s translation tool can help, see Tietokone (translation), Digitoday (translation), Turre Legal’s blog with the court decision as an enclosed PDF (translation).

EDIT: There’s now a human made translation of Turre Legal’s blog entry and I’m trying to get the story published on Slashdot.

EDIT3: there’s now a proper post in English on Turre Legal’s own blog.

My attempt to sum this up is as follows: the verdict is contrary to what a district court thought of the same case last year when two local electronic rights activists were declared not guilty after having framed themselves by spreading information on how to break CSS. Back then it was to the activists’ benefit has CSS been badly broken and inneffective ever since DeCSS came out.

Lawyer Mikko Välimäki of the law firm Turre legal, which represents the activists, expresses surprise over the appeal court’s explanation which includes implications along the lines of Linux users not being able to watch dvds without knowingly downloading cracking software.

(image from Wikimedia commons)

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix.

I fixed this by changing opening Settings - Configure Amarok - Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other engine is installed by default these days) output plugin from “default” to “alsa“. The problem is probably related to PulseAudio, a new sound server used by default in many recent GNU/Linux distributions.

WTF, how did the people running Windows Live even come up with such a lousy idea? I’m guessing the explanation, if one ever will be given, will be related to spam/trojans/phising or whatever the latest security scarecrow is. I’m not willing to speculate whether this is some conspiracy to undermine Google owned services, and this would certainly not be the best way to perform such an operation.

Luckily I don’t rely on Windows Live Mess-enger, I merely run BitlBee, a third party IM client in the form of an IRC proxy together with Irssi to be able to talk with a few non-IRC persons.

I also verified that this is true with BitlBee. The filtering appears to occur on the server side, not in the client.

[via: istartedsomething, Tietokone (in Finnish). Image borrowed from Wikipedia]

After upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) I noticed that Amarok (Ubuntu package version 1.4.9.1-0ubuntu3), one of my preferred audio players/music libraries, didn’t properly submit tracks to last.fm. All settings were OK, and Amarok even announced that it submitted the tracks, but nothing appeared on my profile.

Google revealed that this problem can be solved by entering a last.fm user name in ALL CAPS in Amarok’s settings window. The same solution can be applied to solve the same no-scrobbling problem as it may appear while using Rhytmbox, another free software audio player.

Something probably related to this surfaced when I upgraded to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). A program I use a lot, gnome-terminal, no longer has its own setting for disabling cursor blinks under Edit -> Current Profile. Users who want to get rid of this obnoxious response to “no keyboard input” now need to alter the system wide “Cursor blinks in text fields” option under the “System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> General” menu.

What if I only want to disable cursor blinks in gnome-terminal? In some situations in our world that forces black text on white backgrounds upon us, it’s hard to spot a static, one pixel wide cursor, but in a white or gray on black terminal with a fixed width font and a wide cursor, this problem doesn’t exist. By the way, why anyone would agree to use a terminal with black text on a white background is beyond me.

The crippled cursor problem isn’t limited to the gnome-terminal version 2.22.1 binary bundled with Ubuntu 8.04, it’s in the upstream version too. Luckily there’s at least one patch that removes this restriction. I’m sure I won’t take the time to roll my own patched gnome-terminal, but it’s good to know that I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by shit like this.

EDIT: I later realized that a patched binary has been made available by JLTC.

Settings for how the desktop environment should handle removable media are important for me as I loathe the idea of having to deal with any autorun/auto play or popup nonsense every time i attach removable storage devices.
Settings for this have been available under the System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media menu item in earlier versions of Ubuntu/Gnome.

Previously, said window looked approximately like this:

(image borrowed from The Sysad Linux Blog)

In Ubuntu 8.04/Hardy Heron’s Gnome 2.22.1, things look different:

.

Note the lack of reference to anything related to actual removable storage media (CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-ray, flash drives, USB hard drives…). Having settings only for scanners, cameras and such under a “removable media” window looks like a mistake in UI design to me… I haven’t checked if this is Ubuntu specific or something relevant to the vanilla Gnome release as well.

I found a way to stop the dreadful autorun/popup flood posted by user noynac in the Ubuntu forums:

“Load Nautilus and enter edit -> preferences -> media“

[via: Slashdot]

For some time, I’ve used Dimitar Zhekov’s clean, fixed-width font Terminus for terminal-heavy situations in both GNU/Linux and Windows. I’m clueless in the area of typography, but Terminus looks oddly appealing when looking at e.g. code (which I don’t write myself), configuration and log files. I keep backup copies of a TTF version of Terminus in my public file archive.

A few days ago, I discovered Consolas, a somewhat recent addition to Microsoft’s free TTF font collection (available for download on microsoft.com, no special MS software like Visual Studio is required), and I’m probably going to use it for some console based tasks, at least on Windows machines. Please note that Consolas is designed to be used with ClearType, a font anti-aliasing technology found in Windows XP and later. Without ClearType, Consolas isn’t worth looking at.

What I’ve found comparing the aforementioned fonts so far, is that while I like looking at Consolas in my IRC client, I still prefer the more blockish Terminus for staring at and scanning through code and logs. Consolas makes text in human languages, including busy IRC debates, readable at smaller sizes, but is in my opinion suboptimal for navigating through and quickly locating parts of structured text blocks.

EDIT: I’ve later found the following comparisons of fixed-width programming fonts: CodeProject, Stack Overflow.