I Guess I Don't Really Know Jack After All

I don't really do much with video with my computer, so it's not something I've looked into, but while we were in Durham we had some DVD's we wanted to watch (some episodes of Foyle's War, and also Moonrise Kingdom), and our room's DVD player wasn't cooperating so we watched them on on my laptop, which has the biggest screen of the ones we brought down.

The program I used is called LinDVD, which I think is the only remaining part of a defunct, early 2000's attempt to make a Windows-like consumer Linux; LinDVD is not what plays video files -- and in fact has no provision to just open a file and play it, you put in a DVD, and LinDVD plays it, and that's that -- and I normally use something called Totem to play an ordinary video file.

Anyway, we watched the movies, no problem, but then I went to use Totem and it crashed on startup. Uh oh -- did I break something by using LinDVD? No idea, so I tried some other video players (Gnome Mplayer, which is a GUI wrapper around the regular command-line Mplayer program, then Mplayer itself) and they also hung up pretty much at startup.

I started to think that there was something wrong with my codecs: they might have been corrupted by a recent automatic upgrade, so I removed and reinstalled them -- no change. Strangely enough, LinDVD still worked fine (it might have its own codecs), as did Kino, a video editor I have.

The next thing I do is try to put on some music -- and Rhythmbox, my music player, also hangs on startup. I try mplayer again and look at the error messages it writes to the console, and sure enough there's some problems with ALSA, the "advanced Linux sound architecture."

Linux has a very convoluted sound system, and this is another area I haven't really studied up on. Suffice to say that once upon a time, sound was controlled by something called OSS, which then got mostly supplanted by ALSA, which in turn got superseded by PulseAudio, but they all are still there, running and interoperating, not so much in layers like the network stack, but more like a mish-mash.

I'm not sure what LinDVD does, but I'm pretty sure that Kino uses OSS rather than ALSA, so I think I'm getting somewhere. What I try to do next is, remove and reinstall ALSA and PulseAudio. No results, and there seems to be nothing about this problem on The Google, unless you count messages like "your system is way out of date, you should upgrade."

A word about Ubuntu: they make new versions of their distribution about once every six months, which basically become obsolete (that is, unmaintained) within a year or so. They also put a version every two years or so, designated LTS (long term support), which is maintained for about 3 to 5 years. I've used the version 10.04 LTS distribution for years, and it's now near end-of-maintenance; I've resisted upgrading because the next LTS version changes the desktop in ways I don't like, so I'm not exactly bleeding edge in my Linux technology.

I'm basically out of options, and am now resolved to upgrade -- which means backing up my data and configurations, and making a list of all the software I installed outside of the Ubuntu system, just in case... Somewhere in this mess I also made the mistake of removing LinDVD with the intention of reinstalling it, only to find that it's not part of the Ubuntu package universe, and in fact it's not available unless you're say Dell, and planning on shipping it with your computers. D'oh!

There are ways to deal with LinDVD issue as well as the upgrade mess, I just have to jump through the hoops, and I'm working my way up to it, when an upgrade of ALSA pops up in the Update Manager. It basically took 45 minutes to run and upgraded the entire sound system.

I look at the Ubuntu website, and they say that this would basically be the last update for 10.04LTS -- and was meant to be a fix for problems in a previous update (I read that between the lines) which I took to be the planned last update for 10.04. I noticed that it also installed something called jack (yet another component of the sound architecture), this was probably what they were trying to introduce in the broken update. Basically, all my uninstall/reinstall moves just kept reinstalling the broken system; it was not corrupted in my machine per se, but in the software repositories...

So now I have my video and music back, though not DVD's at least not the ones with encryption/DRM, since I guess the only program that had that was LinDVD, and distributing the decrypting package is a legally fraught proposition in the open software world. I'm working on it, and meanwhile I now have a third volume control app (for jack, which I know even less about than the other sound components on my system). I'll skip upgrading for now...

UPDATE: After writing this, I got to thinking about watching DVD's again, so I went online to one of the video player program's websites, and they had some decoding files which are apparently less encumbered. I downloaded and installed what I needed, and sure enough, it worked! Better yet, I can use my ordinary video players, and no longer have to worry about re-installing LinDVD. I just finished watching The Matrix, the only DVD I own and an ironic choice to watch on a computer...

It's kind of funny how 15 years can really date something: The Matrix is still a cool movie (as long as you refuse to acknowledge the existence of the sequels), but 9/11 kind of made watching buildings explode a little less fun, and recent mass shootings put a different spin on the gun fetish scenes. I just finished reading a series of cultural essays, jeremiads really, in a book from the nineties called Commodify Your Dissent (I got it in a Durham bookstore), and the whole book was an indictment of The Matrix's themes and imagery before it ever got filmed...

Three Front Followup

Happy Candlemas-mas! Judging by the weather forecast, Puxnatawney Phil may have some bad news for us tomorrow...

Anyway, some updates:

My running continues semi-apace; I managed to follow my program exactly for exactly one week, then I took the next week entirely off (snowstorms and bitter cold made good excuses). This past week I got back in the game, but I'm not quite back to my program yet. I'm doing a half-marathon in late April, and it's going to be here sooner than I'd like. Meantime, I got my Turner back, with new Hope disk brakes, though I have not gone on a ride yet -- maybe early tomorrow morning, before the chili contest? We also we got in a few XC ski sessions in the past few weeks, and we signed back up at the gym. The pieces are there, I just have to put them in place.

Next up, the jukebox project came together like clockwork, but then we had some Internet problems and the router got rebooted, and when things came back on the NAS and the Raspberry Pi couldn't talk to each other: I had them configured to refer to each other by their IP addresses, which got reassigned when the router restarted. Easy enough to fix as long as I'm around to do it, but not the ideal solution, so (after going through a few hoops, like installing avahi on the Pi), I can now refer to the NAS and the Pi by name. Shut things down, started them up, and it all worked no problem. I've really enjoyed playing with networks and  multiple machines, something I know almost nothing about, and now I think Ill come up with some more Pi projects like a local web server, a print server, and maybe even a weather station (something I've been thinking of doing for years).

And finally, on the cello front, I took my first lesson this past Tuesday. Pretty awesome, I'm on my way -- I can already (almost) play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!"

Setting Up The Dominoes

Morning weigh-in: 192.5#, 26.0% BF

Got up this morning and did a few minutes of yoga (mainly just a bunch of sun salutes) before my shower, while the coffee brewed. After work I went out and ran just under 2 miles, in a less-than-impressive 25 minutes. The reason? I'll be racing another half marathon, with Anne's niece Adele in late April -- the time has come to get back into a training regimen.

Unfortunately, I'd gone out two XC skiing weekends ago; I had a great time skiing with my friends Scott and Jay, and even got a few impromptu pointers -- Jay's a pretty good skier, and usually works at a resort in winter -- but I also got a "hot spot" on the back of each heel, and when I finally went back to work, my work shoes dug right into the bad spots. I took it as  fitting metaphor for the end of my vacation...

It's still there on one heel. It's not sore unless somethings pressed against it, like say shoes or sneakers. The yoga felt fine this morning, even the down-dog calf stretching, but the run tonight was annoying. Stay tuned for more bitching, since I'll be running probably 4X a week for the next several.

Last night we stayed in (Anne has a bad cold) and we watched The Razor's Edge, the original with Tyrone Power. That was supposed to be the Golden Age of Hollywood, but I thought the more modern version (with Bill Murray, maybe late 80's) was much better.

Anyway, tomorrow is light weights in the morning, then another two miles after work. Baby steps.

Three Books

Another day, another book report, but first: It's a rainy day here, but I got up full of pep anyway, resolved to do, among other things some laundry, some yoga and weights, and some dusting & vacuuming -- the vacuum, busted for a few weeks, just got fixed and the general dust/dirt is enough that even I noticed (that's bad).

Anyway... jumped out of bed, tossed in some laundry and got the coffee going, and then Anne, washing some spinach for breakfast, noticed that the water coming out of the tap was brown. Brown! Blech. She called the water department, and they said there was a water main break that they were trying to locate & fix; in the meantime we shouldn't drink or cook with the tap water (not that we would have...). OK, throw out the coffee and tea, start over with some stored water from the basement, and get on with our day, resolving to redo the laundry when the water's fixed.

Some recent reads, in the order I read them:

The Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver

The first two were sort of recommended by various political blogs; I knew that the likewise blog-celebrated Nate Silver had a book out and bought it without any additional recommendation when I saw it (at Penn Books, during our last foray into Philly).

Long story short: the first was meh, the second maybe even meh-minus, but The Signal and the Noise was (or is -- I'm not finished yet) awesome.

I got Twilight of the Elites (subtitle: "America After Meritocracy") maybe a year ago, expecting to read about the problems caused by our current power structure and how it maintains itself. That's pretty much what the book delivered: problems such as baseball scandals and the housing bubble are analyzed in terms of what happened, who screwed up and why, and who did or didn't get held accountable; the main premise is that our "meritocracy" -- or as I'd rather put it, our "so-called meritocracy" since some of the supposedly meritorious things are really just class markers or the result of unexamined privilege -- leads to an elite that is overly competitive (too ambitious, too envious of the next level of success), prone to cheat (since incentives are based on measurable "performance," which can be gamed), and convinced that they are truly the elite since they won their positions based on "performance." He further points out that existing power structures use their positions to work the system in favor of their own members (think private day-care undermining the level playing field of education), which I guess gets back to my point about privilege.

So far I'm with author (though the problem as he puts it looks more like an example of what's wrong with Management by Objectives than anything else), but somewhere in there he seemed to lose focus, and the second half of the book really lost my interest; I had to push to finish it. Too bad really, because the end of the book had some prescriptions for fixing things, including the idea that more equality would help a meritocracy work as it should -- though my own feeling was that meritocracy itself is fundamentally flawed.

Anyway, I finished the book, which is more than I can say for The Victory Lab. This was the story of how the Obama campaign used new concepts from Big Data (automated polls and constant monitoring of the electorate's mood, microtargeting, etc) and an emphasis on evidence in campaign decisions. All well and good, but my expectations was that it would be about the data and tools, and it turned out to be about the people involved, which consultant came up with what insight that led to the idea of microtargeting in some other campaign etc, with only the vaguest idea of what the actual methods were -- just a few Time Magazine-level examples and oversimplifications, like "algorithms" being defined, essentially, as weighted averages. (Poor old Time Magazine used to hit a nerve all the time with me whenever they had an article touching on something I knew anything about: their descriptions and explanations were so plausibly written, but were oversimplified to the point that their meaning was the opposite of whatever the case really was in the thing they were explaining. Drove me nuts.)

The author also had a maddening habit of introducing new actors into the story, then going through long digressive backstories on the new guy's history and CV. The constant jumping back and forth broke up what should have been the straightforward flow of the narrative, and it also eventually became hard to keep track of all the characters involved, both of which made a fuzzy story even fuzzier -- once again, the author couldn't maintain focus.

I got most of the way through before I started skimming, and finally just managed to "finish" the book by plowing through the last few pages in a row. I guess The Victory Lab would make a good read if you're interested in the Obama campaigns themselves and especially the personalities involved, but that's not my cup of tea, and it wasn't what I was looking for in this book.

Luckily I saved the best for last: I picked up The Signal and the Noise on a whim, and before I was done with the introduction I was hooked. Nate Silver is a very smart, personable guy, with a good grasp of the concepts he's writing about, so it's not a surprise that he could write clearly on his subject -- if poor writing is a sign of poor thinking, the converse is probably also true -- but even above that, he's an accomplished and engaging writer.

The book itself is about predictions and forecasts, why so many go wrong and why some don't (to paraphrase the book jacket), and he breaks the book down into two main parts, the first being a description of the problem (bad predictions) over several chapters, and the second part looking at a way to improve the situation (Bayesian statistics). The problem chapters are case studies of political punditry, baseball -- two subjects in which the author really made a name for himself -- weather forecasting and earthquake forecasting, and so on, all totally fascinating. The start of the Bayesian part is where I am now, and it looks to be at least as good.

I can say that I see the appeal of the first two books, and I can see them being enjoyed by the right personality, but The Signal and the Noise is the one that gets my wholehearted recommendation. Take my advice and read it.

(By the way, I finished Bleeding Edge, and I have to say I'm glad I did.)

Two Books

Books, books books, I gotta lotta books for Christmas, better get on it...

What I've been reading lately is Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, basically a historical fiction, semi-detective story about"Silicon Alley" in New York, in the era between the dotcom crash and 9-11. I'm not so sure I like it: it started out slow, then got really good towards the middle, but it's now winding down and it doesn't seem to be coming to any conclusion -- or maybe climax/revelation/resolution would be a better way to say it, unless "life goes on" is the conclusion to the book, and the ending just peters out to the new post-911 normal.

It kind or reminds me of his latest before this one, Inherent Vice, which was also historical fiction (the 60's), and a detective story, and was so -- can I even say this blasphemy? -- boring that I didn't even finish it. I promised myself I'd finish Bleeding Edge, and if it seems worthwhile after that, I might even go back to Inherent Vice. We'll see. I often think he alternates between good and mediocre books, odd=good/even=meh, but this is now two in a row. I still love him, and maybe this is a deliberate branching out, into a better art that I can't appreciate, but this isn't (as far as I can tell) the Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow.

Being Thankful

Don't want to get too earnest here, but do I have a lot to be grateful for -- don't worry, there won't be a list! Sometimes though, it's good to just register in your mind how good you have it...

Remembrance Of Skills Past

I didn't really have a reason to do this, but I decided to see if I could get that program to run on my SDF shell account. It shouldn't be too hard, SDF is pretty similar to my home computer, but since my program makes use of the Mini-XML library (non-standard,  and not installed on SDF), I would have to find a way to get that installed -- without administrator rights, and without messing with any part of the SDF system outside my account's little turf. This also shouldn't be difficult, I'd done similar things before, but I just didn't remember how.

Here's how: In my home directory I made my own "bin" and "lib" directories, then I downloaded and unpacked the compressed mini-xml files, and then did the configure/make process with my home directory as target. That got the new libraries installed in my "lib" directory.

The next step was to download my program code and make the file. No problem, though I changed my Makefile to know about my lib directory.

The final step -- the one I forgot, and the one that took a while to find with a Google search, since most instructions assume you have root access and are doing things in the standard way -- is to set the library search path to check my personal lib directory as well as the others:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/home/directory/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

(I also put that in my profile and exported it.)

Anyway, it worked like a charm, and now I can play with my program anywhere I can access SDF -- like my phone, thanks to ConnectBot and much to Anne's chagrin while we were out last night...

(Hopefully, if I need to remember how to do something like this again in 10 years or so, or if someone else looks for a solution to the same problem, this will come in handy.)

The Book Of Lists

Here's a list of the books I'm reading:

The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Daimond
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
The Year's Best Science Fiction (30th Edition), ed by Gardner Duzois

On deck:

Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan (a loan, so I better get it finished)
The Game of Thrones series (also  a loan)

Recent Music:

Lately I've been downloading music I hear on Radio Paradise, so recent acquisitions include Younger Brother, Alt-J, VAST, and Beth Orton.

This is in addition to recent efforts to round out my collection: the B-52's, Radiohead, Negativland, Big Star, Midnight Oil, and the Stereo MC's.

Also: Australia's Triple-J brought me to Seth Sentry and Art vs. Science.

Reviews of all the above to follow, eventually. Maybe.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!