59’th year – Page 21

Animal kingdom

The dogs are settling in to a better routine. We all have more
fun when they take their walks separately, so they decide who goes
first. This morning it was Sunny who went first, and we saw this
beetle on the sidewalk. Sorry, just the cell phone camera; I
didn’t have the real camera with me.

beetle on sidewalk

Monte finally got to meet the dogs downstairs, who have been
seeing and hearing (and barking at and with) him since he came.
Xander, the male Newfie, didn’t like him much, but he and Boo (a female
mutt
about his size) enjoyed chasing each other around.

CSS to drool over

I’m still thinking about a better visual design for the Serpent Publications
Site.

What I’m basically planning is images of petrucci and lilypond
in the top and bottom of the page, preferably merging into each
other. I talked about how to do the transcription in this series of posts.

But every so often I look at the sites designed by real graphic
artists and wish I could have something like this.

Probably not, and it would still take a lot of work to get the
background image I would want. But I’ve gone as far as googling
for a wordpress theme based on that css.

More about the Gates arrest

I guess I should have expected it, but it surprises me yet
again that there are so many people trying to hard to sympathize
with the policeman rather than with Professor Gates.

Both the comments on the news items and the conversation after
band rehearsal last night reveal a remarkable portion of the
population (mostly but not entirely white and male) who really
want to believe in the face of all the evidence that people in
authority know what they’re doing.

Probably not all of these people have been reading the blogs
and news items as avidly as I have. But the band member who
seems to be in that category kept saying, “There might be things
we don’t know.” I pointed out that we now have the story from the
point of view of both major participants, and then someone else
said, “And one of them makes the police department look bad, and
the other one makes it look really bad.”

Here’s the police
report, which in my opinion does not justify an arrest even if
it’s all gospel truth, and here’s Gates’
story as told to theroot.com.

This is all pretty much what conversations were like during the
Anita Hill testimony about Clarence Thomas. There were a lot of
men who thought, “This couldn’t have happened because things like
this don’t happen.” And not all women necessarily believed that
everything happened exactly the way Anita Hill said it did, but we
all knew lots of cases of things exactly like that having
happened.

Of course, as a Cambridge voter and taxpayer, what concerns me
most right now is that as reported in the papers, the Cambridge
Police department seems to be most urgently concerned with
tracking down who leaked the report. Of course, in this case I’m
sure there are things we don’t know. I certainly hope one of
them is some better training and supervision of the officers on
the street.

Gates Arrest

The big news in Cambridge these days is that the police arrested a
Harvard professor for having trouble with the key to his
apartment building. Here’s a Boston Globe story about what the
professor, William Gates, was up to in 2004.
If you want the raw data about the arrest, here’s the
police
report.

If I were having trouble getting into my building, I would
expect more sympathy from both the neighbors and the police than
it looks like Gates got. Some people who commented on the news
reports said that it looked to them like Gates played the race
card awfully soon, but I think his judgement was correct that
the difference between what I’d expect and what he was getting
was because he’s a large black man and I’m a small white woman.

I would also expect that people would cut me some slack if
under the circumstances I were a little upset or angry. I think
there’s a lot of reason to suspect that the Cambridge police
don’t all have enough experience doing this.

In any case, as a Cambridge taxpayer and homeowner, I expect
that if someone sees what they think is a breakin, the police
will ask for ID. No matter how rude the “suspect” is, if the ID
reveals that the “breakin” is to the person’s actual residence,
I would expect the police to either go away or be helpful.

I certainly hope the people running the city figure out a way
to make this go away without wasting lots of taxpayer money on lawyers.

Where I was in 1969

Everybody else who has a blog and is over 40 is reminiscing
about where they were when Apollo 11 landed 2 men on the moon, so
I guess I will too. (See all the science fiction writers at tor.com.)

It was between my Freshman and Sophomore years in college. I
was a physics major at Brown University in Providence, RI, but I
was at home with my mother and sister in Fall River, MA.

My summer job that year was in a tutoring program at Bristol
Community College for students who were judged to need some
remedial work to handle college level courses. I was teaching
three classes a day in remedial math, and getting home utterly
exhausted. So I usually took a nap after supper while my mother
was watching the news, so staying up late didn’t bother me as much
as it did some people.

I had vivid memories of hearing about Sputnik over the radio
at breakfast in 1957, and I knew that was directly tied to my
parents having better and more stable jobs teaching science in
college. So I probably thought the moon landing would lead to
there being good jobs for physics majors in a few years.

I was also a pretty avid science fiction reader, so I probably
thought it was a first step towards having humans living elsewhere
than on one planet. I remember having nightmares in 1962 or so
after seeing a film of George Gamow explaining about the life
cycle of the sun. He said it would become a red giant in
only a couple of billion years. I think the pictures in the
nightmare were actually from the chapter in a Bible stories book about the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt.

I was probably as wrong as lots of other people about the
directness and speed with which we were going to accomplish any of
those things, but if we ever do have extraterrestrial colonization
and reliable jobs for physics majors, it will be partly
because of NASA and Apollo 11.

Isabelle the iguana

Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of her, but she looks a
bit like this one from google images:

[iguana in Cincinnatti zoo width=450]

Sunny and I were hanging out on a beautiful evening in the
park when a neighbor walked up with her on top of his head and
introduced her as Isabelle. We’d
met the human before because he likes talking to Sunny. She’s apparently really
glad the warm weather has come at last and she can go for walks.
Her tail hangs down his back, to past his waist.

Dog Parks again

A few years ago, I made a post about the dog park that
Sunny and I
were going to. It was a big part of my life for several years,
but last year, they closed it for refurbishing at about the time
I was spending a lot of time on Bonnie’s
estate. So I stopped being in the habit of stopping what
I was doing at 6 PM and going there and hanging out with Sunny’s
and my human and canine friends.

[Sunny at dog park in 2000]

There is actually an enclosed dog run not too far from there.
It’s nothing like as good a space but does seem to fill a
similar function for a smaller number of people.

I went to check it out last night, because starting next
Thursday, Sunny and I are going to be having his cousin Monte
stay with us while my mother and sister go to Poland for two
weeks. Now that Sunny isn’t moving so fast, there are a number
of places I can let him off the leash that aren’t official dog
parks, but I wouldn’t want to do that with a young, active dog like Monte
who doesn’t know the area.

[Monte]

As a place to take Sunny, it’s no better than a lot of more
convenient places we go, but assuming Monte turns out to be a good
dog park dog, I’ll probably be bundling both dogs into the car and
taking them there while I have the two of them to deal with.

One thing I noticed was that the owner who spent the whole time
she was there on her cell phone had to leave sooner than she had
planned on because her dog (a 2-year old Newfoundland) had some
undesirable interaction with another dog (I didn’t see what it
was; I doubt that it was anything serious). People really
shouldn’t assume a dog park is a substitute for interacting with
their dogs — you should be using the time to socialize with both
the dogs and the humans so that your dogs get used to how it’s
done right.

Digitizing Vinyl

I had some vacation ideas, none of which seems to be happening,
so I’m feeling like I deserve to spend some money on something.
I’ve looked at some knitting books, and surround sound systems,
and ordering gourmet spices and chocolates.
This morning what seems to be itching is the idea of digitizing
my collection of LP’s.

I was buying LP’s from 1968 when I went to college until about
1988 when I bought a CD player. For some of that time I was
making reasonable amounts of money, and when I wasn’t I was
living near record stores with $.99 sale bins, and that was the
period when my musical tastes were forming. So having my CD’s
digitized and easily accessible on the computer is good, but it
would be a bigger contribution to being in touch with my
personal history if I had the LP’s.

I was convinced enough that I wanted to do this to dig up the
right set of cables to put the output of my stereo system into a
computer sound card, when it turned out that my turntable from
1973 was pretty sick. I kicked it a while, and when it didn’t
get better I put it out for the trash on a Wednesday afternoon.
(Trash collection is on Thursday in this part of the world, but
electronic devices don’t usually last that long on this busy
street near MIT and Kendall Square.)

At the BLU
meeting Wednesday night, someone said that they had
digitized their videotapes by buying a gadget that copied them
to cd’s and then ripping the CD’s to their computer. It really
seems like that’s the way to go for LP’s, too.

So I currently have this in my Amazon
shopping cart. I may convince myself that this isn’t what to
spend money on, or that I won’t want to spend the time putting
the LP’s on the turntable and labeling the CD’s. But for now,
that’s what’s next on the toy-buying list.

I have a further fantasy that I can rent it for small amounts
of money, or gift bottles of wine, and that when I’ve digitized
the records some of them can be sold. But I certainly wouldn’t
spend the money if I couldn’t afford it without monetizing it.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001MZTZCG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

MythTV discussion

I went to a Boston Linux and Unix
Users Group (BLU) meeting last night to hear a talk on MythTV by one of its developers
(Jarod Wilson who works for Redhat).

Some points of interest about real world MythTV use:

Recording from a cable box is more haphazard than you would
wish — the most reliable way to record anything you’ve paid to
be able to watch is to get the Hauppage HD-PVR which lets you
plug in the composite video cables from the cable box and use an
IR blaster to change the channels. Modern cable boxes have a
firewire output, which should let you both record digitally and
change the channels, but it’s fairly haphazard what channels
your cable company will let you see unencrypted on the firewire
output. Also, the HD-PVR will allegedly record in either 720p
or 1080i, but there are some issues with the linux drivers for
interlaced video, so you’re currently safer sticking to
720p.
Most of the USB remote control boxes on the market,
including the HP branded one that I inherited from Bonnie, are
essentially the same as the Windows Media Center one.
If you’re setting up a filesystem partition for mythtv, XFS
is currently stable and designed for large files. ext3 is
usable; ext4 is a bit bleeding edge and people have lost data
using it.
If you can’t handle the volume on the mythtv users mailing
list, there’s an indexed
archive that you can search.
The speaker repeated the common wisdom that an NVidia
graphics card with the NVidia binary-only driver “just works”.
This has been very much not my experience, but it must be true
for lots of people.
He admitted that his first install of MythTV took a week of
hard work before it “mostly worked”. He says that once you have
the setup working, using it (even for the non-technical) is no harder than a commercial
system (such as Tivo), and administering it is a couple of
minutes a week for an experienced Linux user, but setting up is
definitely harder than it should be.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0018LX0DY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Backing Up

I just upgraded my computer hardware, so I’m typing this on a
shiny new
computer with 4 cpu’s, a terrabyte of hard drive, and 8 Gigs
of memory.

Getting all the stuff from the old computer to this one is
still harder than it should be, but is easier when you upgrade
while the old system is still working.

What ought to be true is that if you move the /home directory,
install the same set of packages, and import the data from the
database, you should have a working system.

Some people claim that you can just copy /etc and /var to the
new computer and then the new system will work the same way the
old one did. I didn’t find this to be true, and I’ve been hand
moving the things from /var and /etc that I turn out to need, or
reconfiguring the new system. Part of why this is less true for
me is that the new system is a 64 bid install, and the old one
was still 32 bits.

In any case, when you have the luxury of the old system still
working is a good time to check that your backup procedure is
working, and to add things to it as you find yourself manually
moving something from the old system to the new one.

The most embarrassing hole in my procedure was that I found my
system for entering lilypond into emacs via USB keyboard didn’t
work because I’d installed a little program it needed in
/usr/bin (which should be only executables from the package
management system, and doesn’t get backed up) instead of
/usr/local/bin.

I don’t yet have either gallery2 or wordpress working right on
the new system, but the old system seems to have the same
problems, so it probably isn’t the backup procedure.

My own backup procedure is largely rsnapshot, along with some
scripts that back up databases and the websites that are hosted
elsewhere. This gets everything you need (as long as you tell
it the right files to back up), but is fairly large and
cumbersome, so one of the things I’m missing is recent off-site
backups. It backs up to a 1
terrabyte firewire drive. Each backup takes up about 160
Gigabytes, but the files that are the same are hard linked, so
10 backups are only about 200 Gigabytes.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the new system, because now when
the backup procedure starts I just barely notice, instead of
having to stop what I was doing on the computer and go get a cup
of coffee.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001NXDBFY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00169AQQ2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr