Odd Lots
- Well, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is out there, but I had other committments yesterday and couldn’t download it on Day One. This may have been a good thing; there was a last-minute bootloader bug that interefered with dual-booting with Windows. Still, I’ll be installing it on one machine or another ASAP and will report here.
- Tom’s Hardware posted a solid comparison of Linux office apps yesterday, and if you’re considering Linux for day-to-day work, it’s worth a close read.
- I got the Audiveris sheet music OCR app installed the other night, and it does work–however, it requires 300 DPI sheet music scans in order to operate, and none of the ragtime sheet music I found online was anything close to that high-resolution. (I tested it using high-res example scans installed with the app.) As with most Java apps, it is agonizingly slow: It took seven seconds to pop up a simple Save As dialog, on a 3.2 GHz SX270 with 1 GB RAM. I also had trouble getting audio output via its MIDI support; however, after saving the generated MIDI to a disk file, the MIDI file played normally through several different player apps.
- Rich Rostrom did send me a link to another composition by Irene Giblin, the author of the Ketchup Rag: The Chicken Chowder Rag. Here’s a video of an ancient record playing it, and another (far better) video of a piano roll of the song playing on a player piano. Here’s a short bio of the long-lived composer…and (finally) a MIDI file of the Ketchup Rag itself.
- ZDNet posted one of the better ebook reader evaluations I’ve seen lately, and while it appears to be Kindle vs. iPad, it’s really e-ink vs. backlit LCD. I’m currently with LCD. I don’t read outside for many reasons, including a lack of comfortable chairs out there, and a feeling that if I’m outside I should be walking or climbing or digging or something.
- Making large numbers of books portable is what the ebook thing is all about. Here’s another approach: Climb inside your circular bookshelf and start walking.
- Of course there’s lots of 2010 still ahead of us, but charts from the NOAA indicate that severe weather in the first four months of the year has fallen to what looks like a ten-year low.
- The post was 23 days late, but better late than never: Fear the homeopathic bomb!
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ebooks · hardware · humor · linux · music · software
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Protea is now running 64-bit Lucid Lynx. I just blew away my install of 32-bit Karmic and installed it; not a big issue, since my home directory and other critical files were on a completely different drive. So far so good; it works unobtrusively, like Linux should. Not sure I like the window manager putting the close button on the left, but that is where it is on the Mac…so there is precedent.
I discovered that Ubuntu 10.04 does not work properly when installed in a VMWare VM. It doesn’t seem to connect to the keyboard, so you can’t even log in. (I’m using VMWare Fusion on a Mac.)
Did some digging and apparently they have been aware of this bug since March but it is still there. Ubuntu 9 still works fine in that environment.
Whoa. That’s a Class 1 bug. (Maybe Class 0.) Do you use USB keyboards? There is a well-known problem with USB under VirtualBox and I’m wondering if that isn’t an instance of a broader class of VM problems. I only just barely got Lucid installed the other night, and have done very little with it so far apart from install a few of my usual apps. Let us know if you run across a fix.
Sorry for the delay in responding. I’m using a year-old MacBook Pro and its normal keyboard. The bug reports I read did not mention the Mac version of VMWare specifically, so I guess it was probably noticed in the PC world first.
I’ll drop a line to one of my old Digital/AltaVista colleagues (now a kernel engineer at Canonical) and see if he has any insights about this.
For those who read the Homeopathic Bomb article but did not understand the final sentence (“There is that little problem of succussion to overcome, though”):
Liquid homeopathic remedies are “activated” before each use by succussion, which is to say, forcefully agitating the liquid, typically by striking the bottom of the bottle repeatedly against the heel of one’s other hand.
Hey, I ain’t volunteering!
VMWare Fusion on the Mac had an upgrade to version 3.1 yesterday, and it fixed the keyboard problem with Ubuntu 10.04. No problem logging in now. I cannot say whether this was a problem in non-Mac versions of Ubuntu, or, if so, whether there has been a fix.
It is rather nice to be able to run Snow Leopard, Leopard Server, Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD 8, and Windows 7 all on the same machine.