Stop Defacing Library Books!

I was sitting in the public library, reading a book from their collection, when I ran across this:

How wrong can you get? Defacing library books is petty vandalism, even for members of the self-appointed spelling and grammar police. What’s worse is that the book is correct as written; the “correction” is totally wrong. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, exorcised means "To clear (a person or place) of evil spirits; to purify or set free from malignant influences." There were no evil spirits around; the king was so displeased ("exercised") about the path the river might take that he had it diverted to remain in China. Do us all a favor, and read without a pencil.

I'm now a Man in Black, but without the flashy thing.

I am finally working again. I work for the federal government of the USA, albeit on a strictly temporary basis.  Although the USA has no Official Secrets Act, I am nevertheless sworn to secrecy and thus can't tell you much, on the pain of fines and imprisonment. Really! It's too bad, because I'm getting some really funny stories from this job. C'est la vie. I think it's OK to tell you that I made $US 77.5625 today (before taxes). Cha-ching!

I have no flashy thing, but I want one. A Pilot G2 pen is a poor substitute. Even if you load it with a Mont Blanc cartridge. Government issue ballpoint pens tend to self-destruct and leak ink. The government will disavow any knowledge of (or responsibility for) your ink stained self, including your clothing. I found one of my father's old pocket protectors; it not only gives me a warm feeling (I really miss Pop) but it protects my shirts from federal blue ballpoint pen ink. The government issue number 2 pencils and the federal blue pencil sharpener do kick ass.

I don't get to ride in a helicopter, or carry a firearm, or any other weapons for that matter. I don't have a car with a siren or lights, either. Everyone should feel much safer knowing that. I do get to wear a spiffy non-photo ID card on a lanyard around my neck. I also wear a shirt and tie, and I don't wear sneakers or jeans, so I look almost professional. If you close one eye and squint a bit.

Life is good, for now. Best of all, tonight was taco night. And did I mention the $77.5625, before taxes?

My Life as a Rōnin

Toshiro Mifune as an old school rōnin

"A rōnin (浪人^?) ^[1] was a samurai with no lord or master during the feudal period (1185–1868) of Japan. A samurai became masterless from the death or fall of his master, or after the loss of his master's favor or privilege."

Source: wikipedia

So Theresa, who is someone that I saw once, but never really met, has a problem. She has a pierced tongue, which freaks me out, but that's my problem. She's the girlfriend of Phil, who is someone that I have met but I don't see a lot. Phil and I hang around  sometimes while holdings things like beer and fishing rods. He has a really cool dog named Austin, who seems problem free. Theresa's problem is an HP netbook running Windows XP. The problem is the computer just ain't right. It's a really cute little machine -- much nicer that my eeePC 900. It has a nice big keyboard and a slightly larger screen. I want one, but, as they say,  it's not in the budget. She gave the netbook to Brian to fix and he worked on it a bit. He cleaned up some, but not all, of the ugly mess. He managed to blow out the passwords that her ex-boyfriend had helpfully added to the machine, and got rid of a few hundred items that a virus scanner flagged as malware.  The system was still borken: it would not connect to the Internet and it was doing really strange things, and it was doing them very slowly. Brian asked me for help. It seems that since none of us is working, the budget for this job is zero. Fool that I am, I agree to take a look at it. It feels like work, which I like, but pays nil, which I don't like. Aw, snap! I have to quit giving it away.

It's so beautiful! I want to put Crunchbang Linux on it!

Mind you, I am not really an IT person. I'm an electronics technician who went to night school to get a degree in electrical engineering. I was a UNIX system administrator for an engineering group, a CAD librarian, a printed circuit board designer, a sort of general-purpose electronics technician. I used to wire TV sets with about a hundred thermocouples so we could see how hot the components would get. (Pretty hot, sometimes.) I run Linux for my desktop, I use Vi and Emacs, GIMP and moc. I can write crap-ass software in C, C++ and Python. In short, I am just another jack-of-all-trades, master of none, who is currently unemployed. Life stinks, sometimes. These skills gives me some ability to beat computers into submission. I try to pick up a few bucks sorting out computer problems for people. These are usually not difficult problems involving hardware repair. These are usually simple things related to system configuration and using software, things that someone could and should handle themselves. Finding a solution usually involves asking Google, thinking logically and maybe learning a thing or two.

I get few takers for my services. People do not want to pay. I hear complaints about the lack of service technicians, closely followed by complaints about what service technicians charge. Service technicians tend to want a living wage. Clients seem to like "free", closely followed by "really cheap". At times it's hard to find a middle ground, so I get few jobs, while they keep doing whatever they do.

My pal Brian once charged a guy $50 to sort out a computer. The guy paid him $12, because it only took an hour. I guess computer techs are only worth $12/hour, with no benefits or secure employment. Brian took the $12, and then formatted the guy's hard drive for him, giving him a minty fresh computer. Brian is a natural born BOFH. The client was not happy. Brian kept the $12. Life stinks, sometimes.

Be afraid.

My aunt's brother is having phone problems. He will not call AT&T to come out and check things out. He says that they charge $80/hour, and he doesn't want to pay that. He thinks that a huge bill will be run up, and that they are out to screw him. AT&T will check the phone line up to the house for free, but he will not even ask for that. He would rather complain about things. Kvetching sure is more fun. He did go out and spend $80 for a new DSL modem, as if that would fix his problem. It didn't. I took a look at things. He has two phone lines, and one is borken. That's as far as I went. I was not about to chase the line through the house from the second floor, especially since he refused to call AT&T to have the phone line checked to the house. I was not going to call AT&T for for him; he should know how do do that. As far as I know, it's still borken. Life stinks, sometimes.

So I fixed Teresa's netbook for free. Why not? A loss leader, and maybe I now have another fine friend that I will hear from only when they need me. It took 3.5 hours, mostly because that's how long it takes. He's what I did:

• Wifi was not working, but Brian's Cricket modem worked, so I did not have to fix the wifi now or take the little beast home to my router to get Internet access. You can't do jack without an Internet connection.

• I updated Malwarebytes, which Brian had installed. I like this program; it has done good things for me in the past.

• I ran yet another full virus scan in "limited driver mode" using Malwarebytes, which removed yet more malware. 

• I ran Microsoft update. They were 9 updates. 7 or 8 of them were security updates. Why didn't she run Windows update regularly?

• I then tried to turn Microsoft Security Essentials back on. (Brian had turned it off.) It would not turn on. (Insert joke here.)  OK. Microsoft's anti-virus program did not work on Microsoft's operating system. It also would not reinstall, and gave an error message with the long hex error code 0x8004ff07. (It should have said guru meditation 0x-long-hex-number, but it didn't. Amigas were so much cooler, even when they screwed up. I miss my Amiga.) Following the hex error number to a Microsoft forum, some guy gave this fix:
  
  
  1.       Uninstalling MSE
  2.       Reboot.
  3.       Reinstall MSE.
  4.       Cancel the update and scan.
  5.       Reboot.
  6.       Launch MSE and trigger upgrade via Help, Upgrade.
  7.       Download and install completed successfully.
  
  
  Someone from Microsoft urged the parties involved to file bug reports with Microsoft. He gave helpful web links. At times it's hard to find a middle ground.  I want Microsoft to run more tests on their code before they release it to the wild. They want me to write bug reports. Neither of these things are going to happen. 

• I started on the Microsoft Security Esentials fix. After the first step (remove MSE), I made a command decision: I was not going to reinstall it. MSE blows. Microsoft blows. MSE gets good reviews for malware detection, but I have been having problems with it doing simple tasks, things like updating virus definitions and turning on. So I uninstalled it and replaced it with the free version of AVG. The AVG install told me that I should remove MSE. Since I had already removed MSE, I installed AVG anyway. (Déjà vu: I have seen this before.) AVG works OK, despite the bogus warning.

• I update AVG. I run a configuration scan. I run yet another virus scan using AVG. It finds nothing bad.

• I turn the Windows firewall back on. (Brian had turned it off.) (Insert yet another turn-on joke here.)

• If fixed the wifi. Someone or something mucked around with the tcp/ip settings. Once they were set correctly, wifi worked.

Maybe I should have turned on system restore, but I stuck a fork in it because I was done and Starbucks wanted to close. 

 After, 3.5 hours the netbook was now working fine. While it did not demand my complete attention the whole time, I had to be there to shepherd the process. For zero dollars. Brian has another job, which is supposed to pay actual US dollars. Some doofus wants us to install OS X on his HP netbook, and is willing to pay us something for it. Since Apple really doesn't want you to do this, it's kind of tricky. This should be fun.

The Third Time's the Charm

 L'ispettore Coliandro on Wikipedia

I caught the rebroadcast of Inspector Coliandro on MHz Worldview's International Mystery last night. This time the broadcast engineers rediscovered how to vertically center the video on the screen. This is a good thing, because that's where the English subtitles are located. The subtitles make it much easier for me to follow the story, because I sure don't understand much Italian.

Even with subtitles, Inspector Coliandro is still a doofus who needs to stand closer to a razor. Much closer. Despite his scruffy appearance, he somehow got transferred back to the flying squad, even after ordering a multi-lifetime supply of yoghurt cups for the police. (Sadly, the flying squad has no airplanes. They just cruise around in unmarked police cars, just like the Chicago PD.) He did solve some crime: he rescued his partner from a frame-up, got the goods on a bent copper and put the whammy on a purse snatcher. Even better, he made kissy face with a hot chick from a family of petty criminals. (They were sort of like an Italian version of the Timson clan from Rumpole of the Bailey.) Still, I'm not sure if Coliandro is a keeper, even if he does get lucky with a different hottie in each episode. (I do bet ya that he never even gets near to first base with the smoking hot prosecutor, Dottoressa Longhi.)

I guess time will tell. They seem to have more episodes of Inspector Coliandro in the pipeline, and they're going to run them no matter what I think.

Regular TV

I'm a terrible couch potato. It's a not-so-secret sin, a guilty pleasure. These days, I watch most of my video entertainment on my computer, rather than on my television. Given a fast enough connection to the Internet, you can get free video on demand. I just love it. I think when I get working again I am going to build a MythTV box and go nuts.

I don't have cable or satellite. (They cost money, which is currently in short supply.) I just have plain old Chicago-area broadcast TV, which is free.  I don't watch a lot of regular TV these days, except for Sundays. Sundays I can get my fix of foreign detective shows on MHz Worldview's International Mystery. What a great show! It's not available online. WYCC Chicago carries it on channel 20.3. I get to watch Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander in subtitled Swedish, George Simenon's Inspector Maigret in subtitled French, Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano in subtitled Italian... you get the picture. Every week, you get detectives in a foreign land chasing the bad guys. I just love it.

How cool is this: French police get to drink on the job. I love when Inspector Maigret (played by Bruno Cremer) orders une bière or cognac while working. This is normal for him, as normal as eating cassoulet. In the USA, cops aren't supposed to drink on the job.

My absolute fave is Tatort ("Crime Scene"), which is in German. The episodes currently being shown are with the detectives Max Ballauf and Freddy Schenk, who are in the kripo ("kriminal polizei") in Cologne, Germany. They chase murderers. As the characters in The Wire used to say, they are natural born po-lice. They even arrest an elderly fugitive nazi murderer in one show, which gives them bonus points in my book. I am jealous of them because they have easy access to currywurst and unpasteurized beer, even while on the job.

I don't like all of the shows. There's a show with some Italians running around in it (OK, it's titled La Omicidi) where the only cool thing is the bad guy, who wrote Dante's La Divina Commedia on the walls of his cell in prison, and is smarter than everyone else in the whole world. Then there's the current guy, Inspector Coliandro, who seems to be a doofus who bulk orders more yoghurt than even the guy on Burn Notice could eat. I'm not the only one who is less than thrilled with Inspector Coliandro. MHz Worldview sent me this in a email:

Inspector Coliandro: Second Time's the Charm?
Many of our viewers had mixed feelings about the premiere of Inspector Coliandro last month. The tone of this series is different than some of our other offerings, but give it another chance. You may like the second episode better. Inspector Coliandro: Into A Trap, Sunday, February 21 and Tuesday, February 23 at 9PM ET/PT

OK, let's give the show another chance. So, it's Sunday, time for the show. I sit and watch some of the news from Germany, which is on before International Mystery. The video is just fine. The opening for International Mystery comes on. The video is just fine. Inspector Coliandro comes on. The video is now "borken". Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The video is shifted down from the top of the screen, which cuts of the bottom of the video frame, while leaving an empty black bar at the top. The subtitles are conveniently invisible because they are in the cut off portion of the frame. Aw, snap! Can't these idiots center the video on the screen?

To be fair, if I could find the remote for my wonderful set top converter box I may have been able to fix the problem. Maybe. The first episode, which sucked by the way, had flawless video. The second required knowledge of Italian. Maybe the third time's a charm. We'll see.

The New Crossword Puzzle Workaround

I may have previously mentioned my need to print a daily crossword Puzzle for Lizzy. One day, literally overnight, the crossword puzzle from the Chicago Tribune  would not print from my computer. To be more precise, it would not print from my  fully up to date 64 bit Ubuntu 9.10 "karmic koala" machine to my Samsung SCX-4200 printer. Neither would any of the other Flash crossword puzzles. Aw, snap!

Did I change anything? Yep, I do so all the time. I have software updates running all the time. It might be any of the bleeding edge crap that that's installed on my machine. Many computers in the desktop Linux world have a delicate software ecology, and mine is no exception. It could also be any of the stupid things that I do to my computer. It also could be any of the stupid things the folks at Ubuntu and Canonical do to my computer. It could be someone else, somewhere else. I break software all the time. I'm real good at that. I break things, then I fix them. I don't think that I broke Flash crossword puzzle printing -- it could have something to do with the software update installs that are going on all the time -- but I'm not sure. It could be that Flash update that slid in the other day, so don't be quick to blame me and my promiscuous use of synaptic and configure; make; make install to /usr/local.

Chasing for an answer, I researched Samsung, Cups, Linux, Adobe Flash and the Dark Magical Arts. I tried different web browsers. Opera. Chrome. Kazehakase, even. I reinstalled the printer drivers, following tweedledee's excellent and exhaustive instructions on the Ubuntu Forums. (I know, tweedletee? You're taking advice from someone called tweedledee? Hush up! Tweedledee know what (s)he is talking about.) I waved a dead chicken over the computer, the printer and my unemployed son. No joy.  As far as I can determine, I can print from anything except an Adobe Flash crossword puzzle program.

It will not print to the printer,

It will not print to a PDFer.
It will not print on a box,
It will not print from Firefox.

It will not print here or there

It will not print anywhere.

I like green eggs and SPAM,

but I do not like Flash, Sam I Am. 

I think the printer and the print system is OK, but there is some problem related to Flash. My last problem related to Flash was also related to the crossword puzzle. That one one was really annoying -- Flash would not respond to mouse clicks. Great fun. I couldn't do anything with it, it just sat there and ignored me, like just like my friends and family. The problem was neither Flash, nor the Firefox web browser.  The problem was the Compiz window manager used by the default Ubuntu Gnome desktop.  Change the window manager to Metacity, and the crossword puzzle works. (Remember, a delicate software ecology can be part of running of a free and open source operating system. There are a lot of cooks stirring the pot.)

Someone else on the web figured this out. I didn't know Compiz from Metacity before this. I'm running Metacity right now. Compiz is still "borken".

Well, everything worked until now. Now printing is "borken" for the Flash crossword puzzle, and I can't find a fix. The work around was to boot Windows Vista, and print the crossword puzzle. (Go figure. It works great there.) This is unacceptable not only because it is surrendering to the dark side of the force, but because it also takes half of forever. It wouldn't be so bad to be evil if it were only a bit faster. I spent a day tweaking this broken-down Edsel of an operating system, and it's still is way too slow. It's like a Crown Vic with a four cylinder engine. For an evil company, full of really smart people, bent on world software domination, this is a sorry excuse for an operating system. I'm tired of booting this slowpoke every stinking day for the woman I love.

So the new work around is to change crossword puzzles. I needed to find one that I can print out for Lizzy. So good-bye, Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle. Good-bye to flash crossword puzzles. Yes, even though both of Lizzy's parents worked for the Trib, it's time to move on.  It' been fun. Hello, Washington Post crossword puzzle, which uses Java instead of Flash. It also can generate a .gif file, which I can print out.

Problem almost solved. I'm calling it a day.

Addicted to Binary Blobs

 The Mono folks, lead by Miguel de Icaza, released a Moonlight 3.0 Preview that actually plays Microsoft Silverlight 3 videos on my 64-bit Ubuntu Linux box. I was able to go to the NBC Olympics website ("Powered by Microsoft Silverlight") and actually watch videos on Linux. Before this did not work at all, and yes, I had Moonlight installed. It just didn't work on these videos. With the 3.0 preview installed, it just worked. (Well, it just worked after I followed the prompting to accept a license agreement and download some codecs, but that's the norm for non-free software.) When I played a video, first I am warned that I am using an unsupported operating system, and then the video plays. It plays pretty good in the small window embedded in the web page, but it seems to have problems with full screen. (That could be a problem with my network connection.) Well done, folks! Kudos!

Of course, if I go to the site for Microsoft Security Essentials and try to play the installation video, all I get is audio. Not that I could (or would) install that software on Linux, but still, the Silverlight installation video still should play. It works on Windows.

Wow. I have just now lost all my open source credibility. Umm, play ogg?

I'm a sucker for sound and video. Seriously. I listen to more music, radio and TV on my computer than I do using any other device. I probably should not be wasting so much time, but I do need to get my fix. I watch my video and listen to my music on Linux, not on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. It all works pretty well most of the time, but I can't do it without using non-free "binary blobs" of software. This is the norm for Windows and Mac OS X, but Linux is generally free and open source. Generally. The dirty secret of Linux is that almost everyone who plays sound and video usually does so with proprietary, non-open source software, such as MP3 or Flash. This stuff may be free as in free beer, but it is not free as in free speech. There are open source alternatives, but it can be hard to find radio stations and video sources using them. It's not pretty, but that's the way it is. You can read all about Free and Open Source Software issues at the Free Software Foundation. Play ogg, if you can. If you can't, you must make you own choices. I put the binary blobs in. You might choose to leave them out.

According to my beautiful and talented sweetie, Miss Lizzy, the most important thing my computer does it print out the day's crossword puzzle for her.  She's not very upfront about this, but that's that the way it is. She will hover around me in the morning, waiting for me to print out the crossword puzzle. (This is a good thing, because I like sugar.) This crossword puzzle in question is an Adobe Flashplayer application that runs in a web browser, usually Firefox for me. All was well until one fine day, the puzzle would not print out. Aw, snap! Dang old software upgrades.

The printer is still working fine, and I can print from any application I want, except from the Flashplayer crossword puzzle. Even the frickin' built in scanner still works. No fun here, and sugar may soon be rationed. There is a work around, but it's fugly. The work around is to tell grub to boot Windows Vista, where Firefox and Flash can print out a crossword puzzle for Lizzy. Yuck! Windows one huge non-free binary blob, and now I need it. This is killing me. Help me! Help me! Next, I'll be on TV with Bill Gates, saying "I'm a pc!" and "Bing!".

The things I do for love.