Wisdom is the prime thing

I came across an interesting news story today about a Massachusetts bill designed to make corporal punishment a banned offense. Apparently, in Sweden it’s already punishable by imprisonment.

The iPod Shuffle is about as minimalistic as a music player can get. It’s small, has 1GB of space on it, no batteries and no moving parts. The power jack is the earphone jack is the USB connector. I love it. Especially since I didn’t pay anything for it.

The problem was getting it hooked up to Linux. Here is what I was looking for. I wanted a setup where I plug the iPod into the computer and it automounts it. I want a simple GUI that allows me to easily manage the files on the iPod. It should be able to convert other formats into mp3 files. It should have playlist support to make it easy to swap preset music selections in and out. And when I’m all done, the iPod should automatically unmount so that I can unplug it. Basically, I need this to be a no-hassle, quick-and-easy, GUI solution.

Here’s how I did it. » Read the rest of this entry

I came across the video short “More” on youtube today. This is a great 6-minute short. I have the Special Edition DVD from despair.com, but I still enjoyed sitting and watching it again on youtube. It’ll be a long time before I tire of this little Academy-Award® nominated masterpiece. I could comment on it for days, but instead I’ll just link to the film and shut up.

After over 300 days of uptime, I had a power outage that required a reboot. As usual, I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest and greatest Archlinux kernel and udev packages. Unfortunately, following the reboot Xine was no longer working! It would come up with the logo misplaced, and a green hue distorting the image. The mouse would move really slowly, and running top showed that the processor was pegged.

Here’s how I fixed it. » Read the rest of this entry

I read a fascinating article about the “One Laptop Per Child” laptops that are available now. For a limited time, anyone from the US or Canada can purchase them. This program has been extended to December 31, 2007.

I’m incredibly impressed with these laptops. Here’s why. » Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been working on a web project that uses a python stack. It uses cherrypy for the web server, cheetah for the templates, and sqlite for the database engine. I wanted to get Unicode working throughout the application. The application should be able to transfer Unicode data to and from the database, have Unicode text in the script files themselves, and be able to display Unicode text, with UTF-8 encoding throughout. It took a bit to gather all the pieces together, but it’s finally working and here’s how.

» Read the rest of this entry

I have a theory that it should be possible to learn to speak a language conversationally in a week’s time.

Here’s how. » Read the rest of this entry

Lately I’ve been noticing a void in my life that I want to see filled. I am speaking, of course, about my need for a personal wiki. Why, you ask?

» Read the rest of this entry

Lately I’ve been using a tiling window manager, which presents a different paradigm for window management. Instead of having to manage your windows yourself, with a tiling window manager, you are given a default arrangement that maximizes your use of screen real estate. As you open and close windows, it places and resizes windows appropriately. » Read the rest of this entry

On Wikipedia there is an interesting article about Gwoyeu Romatzyh, an alternative to pinyin for romanization of Chinese. It uses a brilliant concept of changing spelling to indicate tonal differences. So the character for country, for instance, would not be “guo”, but “gwo”. The u->w change indicates that this syllable takes the second tone. Genius!

Since I’m more of a visual learner than an auditory learner, I wonder if this might have sped up my progress in memorizing Chinese vocabulary.