The Lion sleeps, and will no longer waken

I woke up this morning, went to the bathroom, and turned on the radio to try to get a weather report, but before the weather report I got the sad news that Senator Edward M. Kennedy succumbed to the brain cancer that he’d been fighting for the last 15 months or so.

As someone born in 1960 I pretty much missed all the immediate hubbub surrounding Chappaquiddick, although I couldn’t miss hearing about it even before moving to Boston in 1989. When I did move to the Commonwealth I was able to find out more about the who had already served the voters of Massachusetts for over 30 years, but I wondered if continuing to reelect him was such a good thing. Term limits was already an idea sweeping the country and this voter had already considered it a pretty good idea, just to give someone else a chance to server even more than to keep a single elected official from garnering too much power. But as I learned more about the senior senator from the commonwealth the more I realized it was a pretty good thing that he won reelection again in 2000 and again in 2006.

The thing I’m hearing most is the fact that Senator Kennedy was one of the very few senators who would walk across the aisle of the senate during some very contentious debate on a bill and be able to broker a deal to get the measure passed. Of course as I watch the continuing coverage on WBZ TV (as well as on WBZ AM) I’m seeing that there are more important laws passed in just the last 20 years than I’m aware of  carry Senator Kennedy’s name as a primary force and factor in getting the bills passed. The mere fact that the senior senator from Massachusetts being missing has been identified as a primary reason that President Obama’s health care reform is having so much trouble getting passed, as pointed out by no other than Senator John McCain, Senator Obama’s opponent in last year’s presidential election. I can’t help but feel that the senator from Arizona does quite a bit of whining about losing the election, especially since most of Senator McCain’s public comments since November sounds like sour grapes that he’s not the one who moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but his comments on This Week with George Stephanopoulos over the weekend showed just how vital Senator Kennedy is in the battle for health care reform, a cause important to Senator Kennedy going back to 1962.

Nanci and I join the rest of not just the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but our entire nation in mourning the loss of a man who may have been a consummate politician but who was also one damned good man. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the entire Kennedy family, especially in the wake of this second death in their family in over two weeks with the death of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver on 11 August.

I could go on, but you can see more coverage on the death of Senator Kennedy on

• Boston Globe
• WBZ TV (Boston’s CBS affiliate and Nanci’s and my favorite  news source in Boston)
• President Obama’s statement about the loss of Senator Kennedy (from WBZ TV)
• WBZ AM (Newsradio 1030)
• Reuters
• Los Angeles Times
• New York Times
• Washington Post (free registration required)
• Senator Kennedy’s senate website

Senator Edward M. Kennedy
1932-2009
The end of Camelot is a great loss to our entire country
regardless of your political affiliation

[I spoke with Nanci as soon as I heard the news and asked her if she wanted to write this post, but she asked me to write it to make sure our memorial to the Senator was syndicated to the Ubuntu Universe. - Peng]

It turns out I’ve been right about something

It must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
-Arthur Dent, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

My friends know that while Arthur had issues with Thursdays, Wednesdays are routinely my day from hell, so much so that we have a standing order that we don’t do shopping runs on Hump Days unless they don’t need me to assist. (We’ve decided to switch our primary grocer from Stop & Shop to Market Basket due to a number of issues, and since we can no longer use the Phaser we rely on the HandyShopper app on my PDA to track how much we’re spending. I’ll be writing a post detailing why we no longer rely on Stop & Shop once Market Basket finally gets their website back online.)

As I was reading my morning news I came across a story that shows that I’m not alone in detesting the day at the middle of the week. Christopher Danforth and Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont looked at 2.4 million websites, including blogs and Twitter, and they have found that we like Wednesdays even less than Moandays. What about you? What day do you have more trouble with? Let us know in our poll.

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I know I promised to post more often, but it looks like that’s another case of the “best laid plans of mice.” Just over a week ago my computer locked up, and when I did a hard restart my computer failed to start. I thought it was another glitch in my video system like I’d had a week earlier, but this time I wasn’t even able to hear the friendly Ubuntu (actually the Mac4Lin) startup sound. After several hours of trying to chase down the issue it turned out that my motherboard has failed. It’s not too surprising considering the fact that the mobo is not only several years old but uses the older technology, both in terms of the addon bus system (PCI instead of the newer PCI-E or such) and the RAM type. Needless to say simply getting another mobo of the same technology class is simply not going to happen, I now need to either get or build an entirely new comp.

As a result I’m not going to be able to post nearly as often as I’d like for the foreseeable future. I know it seems I’ve posted words like this a couple of time previously just this year, but there’s no way to resolve this issue short of a new comp and I simply don’t have the resources to pull this rabbit out of my hat. Nanci and I have talked about it and she’s agreed to try to post more often.

Dude, I need a hankie. Les Paul has died.

When you ask most musicians what thought comes to their mind when they hear the name Les Paul, they’ll likely think of the man who pioneered the solid body electric guitar, or at least the style of electric guitar that Mr. Paul developed for the Gibson Guitar Company. If you ask a recording engineer about that name and they’ll either think of the guitar or the man who helped pioneer many recording techniques and effects, truly the man without whom we may not have multitrack audio recording as we know it today. (Disclosure: I spent a number of years as a recording engineer in New Orleans.) Music fans may think of the many hit recordings he made both as a soloist and with is wife Mary Ford.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Alas, musicians and music lovers around the world have a better reason to morn than the recent loss of Michael Jackson (not to dismiss Mr. Jackson’s enormous talent in any way, some people simply were bigger Les Paul fans than Jacko fans) as word came out this afternoon that Mr. Paul has died at the age of 94 of complications from pneumonia at the White Plains Hospital in New Your (the state, not the city).

If you head out with your buds tonight please lift a drink in toast to Les Paul, and if you’re playing a gig someplace in our great big world in the next day or four please feel t0 take a moment to remember this groundbreaking individual who gave us so many incredible tools for passing along the gift of music.

Lester William Polfuss, aka Les Paul
9 June 1915 – 13 August 2009
Thanks doesn’t come close to our gratitude
for what you did for modern music

Read his bio on Wikipedia, as well as the coverage in

• The Los Angeles Times
• The Boston Globe
  
• The New York Times
• WBZ TV, Boston
• Reuters
• CNN
• Guitar World Magazine
• and the range of stories on Mr. Paul’s death on Google News (at least I hope that link works)

I just hit the Publish button, but I have to add a link to a great story from Entertainment Weekly about some of the great songs made with the axe Mr. Paul invented, complete with videos.

Kindle targeted by Defective by Design

You may have heard in the news recently that Amazon is removing features and user generated content from books on their Kindle 2 reader. While many hail devices such as the Kindle as the best thing to come out for lovers of books since the printing press, Amazon has had to deal with some negative responses from publishers. First they disabled the “read aloud” feature on some books without so much as a “do you mind” to Kindle owners, next they sent books that some users had purchased to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky(as Peng calls it). They’ve even deleted one reader’s personal notes on a book. The fact that one of the books concerned is George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 makes it both really sad and kind of funny in  a dark comedic sense.

Peng brought us information on a protest from Defective By Design against the Digital Rights Management (DRM) being used by the Boston Public Librarylast year, and when he sent me a link to a petition asking Amazon to stop controlling their customer’s rights in regard to the Kindle, I asked him to post it here. Unfortunately he’s had yet more problems with his computer this week, which turned out to be just a flaky video cable, and he asked me to blog it instead.

Please consider signing the petitionon Defective By Design’s website asking Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com to stop bowing to pressure from corporate interests and take a stand for the rights of the consumer, especially since the consumer is parting with so much disposable income to buy the Kindle and books to read on it. As the survey puts it,

Whatever Amazon’s reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public’s freedom to use books without interference or supervision.

Peng and I look forward to being able to bring you news of success in this battle with yet another form of DRM.

And Peng? I think we need to get you a new comp for Chrismukkuh. The one you have now sure seems like a gift of someone else’s problems, and it sucks that you have to deal with issues so often.  Perhaps we can set up a way to get donations from our readers to help pay for it, since it seems you’re giving us so much valuable information.

The numbers are in on content thieves

Last Tuesday we mentioned the problems Nanci and I are having with finding that sites are reprinting at least some of our content on their blogs in order to get hits on their site and eyeballs on their adverts. We’re going to keep the poll open a bit longer, but already the numbers are pretty clear. Sixty-nine percent of voters want us to ID the content thieves, 25% of voters simply agreed that content thieves suck, and six percent (one voter) said we need to chill.

As the Creative Commons decleration in the left column of our site now says

The content on this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
You may excerpt or reproduce our content on your site without additional permission as long as you credit the post’s author (and optionally the blog name) for non-commercial use. In addition, placing advertisements between the reuse of our post title and the post content is strictly prohibited. In the opinion of this blog’s owners and authors this constitutes using our content for commercial purposes.

I was talking with Nanci about it last night and we decided to create a new page on this site to let us identify sites that steal our content in hopes of making money from their ads. You will now find a new link at the top of every page on our site labeled IJaA Content Thieves. That page will get updated with each new instance of a site using our content as a medium to show their ads, especially those who post our title, their ad, and at least the first paragraph of our post content. As I’m sure you will notice, the same sites are bound to come up again and again since they ignore our attempts to contact them about the problem. As I said before, we don’t have a problem with people using a blog to make a little money, but we do have a problem with them using our content to do it with. After all, we’re not getting any money from their ads on our content, and we are the ones who take the time and energy to try to write posts that you will want to read.

Why don’t we run our own ads?

Nanci and I looked at ways to make a little money with our blog (her blog, actually, I’m just a writer and co-administrator), and we looked pretty closely at the possibility of bringing in the Amazon associate ads like I had with my old site. The problem is that we’re hosted by WordPress.com and they have a clear policy that if they find ads on blogs they host they have the right to not just suspend our blog but to kill it immediately and without warning. So yes, we’d like to put a way to make a little money on the site but we’d rather keep one blog running rather than have to set up another blog and try to import the content from this one.

Good news for open source loving musos

I have some things that I want to post from my usual sources (hopefully tomorow), but I saw this on Google News and I wanted to make sure it got posted before I forgot about it. Or left an icon on my desktop for so long it’s no longer newsworthy, but it’s practically the same things.

The good news was seen on Nillabyte.com, a tech news and rumor site, and it’s about the so-called fact that if you want to make music you have to use a Mac. This is ignoring all of the great software available like Cubase, cakewalk, etc., for Windows users, not to mention all the great open source titles available for Linux.

Karl Martineau over at Nillabyte has the tale of a music professional who switched all of his Mac live and recording gear over to Ubuntu.

Now if it only didn’t make me miss working as a soundguy.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 2 August

Holy crap it’s been a busy month and a half. Remember the long links post I wrote last month? I’m afraid this one may be even longer, in fact when I started writing it on Friday and I ended up having to save the post and finish it later. I honestly hoped it would have been published on yesterday, but that didn’t work out like it that.

I’ve pulled some of the older items I had flagged for posting, but there are still a few from early this month that I just couldn’t justify not passing along.

• Andrewsomething: GNOME-Colors in Karmic. I’ve played around with some of the Shiki-Colors themes available but I ended up sticking with the Mac4Lin themes. Your milage, of ourse, may vary. Which is the beauty of open source software. Andrew even has a screenshot to help you see why you may love GNOME-Colors.
• Dustin Kirkland The Ubuntu Museum. With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) reaching the end of it’s support lifespan Dustin put together a great site with some great info and images from Ubuntu’s past. If you want to know more, just go to Dustin’s post. It’s one museum you don’t even have to get dressed to go visit.
• Chenthill Palanisamy: What’s cooking in evolution? There are some nice additions coming down the pike for GNOME’s email client, and Chenthill has some info.
• Tyler Mulligan: The “easy” way to listen to internet readio in Ubuntu. Tyler has gone through the usual pain of trying to listen to his favorite ‘net radio station while running Ubuntu, and he’s found a way to do it that is probably easier than any other way, including Rhythmbox and Exaile.
• Alan Pope: Migrating from WUBI to Full Ubuntu Install. Have you (or a friend of yours) looked at Ubuntu with the WUBI tools running on Windows? If so you may have decided you like Ubuntu and don’t really need Windows around anymore. If that sounds like you or someone you know Alan has a nice tutorial on making the switch to full Ubuntu without losing any of the data you currently have.
• Martin Owens: Learning: Identifying Computer Ports. Alan is teaching a System Adminsistration course, and he’s had to come up with some of his own materials for it. Luckily he’s sharing his guide to computer ports with the rest of us. Thanks, Martin!
• Christer Edwards: Updating Default GDM Theme: Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” and My Ubuntu Look and Feel. Christer has posted a pair of tutorials that will show you just how easy it can be to change how Ubuntu looks. Who says you have to settle for how an operating system looks when it comes from the “factory”? Not a GNU/Linux user, that’s for sure, although in all fairness it’s getting to be easier for other OSes as well, although Linux users have a crap load of possibilities to choose from.
• Matthew Helmke: The Official Ubuntu Book, Fourth Edition — first review and more. If you have a copy and want to get an updated edition, or if you’ve been meaning to get a copy and never have yet, you can now get it in PDF format rather than in dead tree format. Matthew’’s even got a link for you to get a sample chapter if you’re not sure you want to get it yet.
• Muammar El Kahtib: Flash player in Google Chrome for Linux. If you’re testing Google Chrome, or even Chromium, you can now enable plugins such as Flash in Chromium! No more having to open another browser just to see Flash applets, whether it’s cheezburgers or something as simple as the MLB Gameday applet to keep up with your favorite baseball team. You can also get some addition info in a post by Omshivaprakash H L.
• Marc Deslauriers: Goodbye Apple. Marc and his wife have had quite a few iPods, but they won’t get another one. I’ll let you read his post for more details, and it’s not simply an I-frigging-HATE-Apple post. I will say, however, that once I can get some details worked out with the device I got a month ago I’ll be posting info on getting another company’s digital media players (DMP) working with GNU/Linux. There’s just one or two annoying little bugs I’m trying to get resolved, but I will say this: You can get a DMP that plays Ogg Vorbis files right out of the box, and as soon as you get it out of the box you can load not only Ogg Vorbis files on it, but also text, pictures and videos (but sadly not Ogg Theora vids) on the little buggers using nothing but your favorite file manager.
• Andreas Nilsson: A tale of menus. I really hate saying this, but they’re at it again. The GNOME devs are changing the themes yet again, this time adding 256×256 icons for places, etc. But it’s not all bad news, unless you’re a third-party theme designer like the good folks at Mac4Lin. At least this time we’re forewarned.
• Garrett LeSage: Nautilus, streamlined. The GNOME artwork devs have come up with a bit of a winner: a simplified Nautilus that gives you more space for the things that count, the filespace you’re working with. There’s a PPA with the new look and I have to say that it looks like it fits with the Mac4Lin themes really well.
• Hylke Bons: Adding fonts in GNOME. Yes, we have yet another post on adding fonts to your system, but Hylke is working on an even easier way to do it, complete with visual mockups. I have to say I really like what he’s come up with so far. Thomas Wood has a followup with a little more work on the idea.
• Linux * Screw: Top 3 Linux HTML editors. If you’re running the MacOS or Windows there are a plethora of options for doing HTML coding, including the old standby “real web designers code  by hand”. Let’s face it, some of us just like having a visual editor handy when we write or change HTML code, even if it’s just for some of the time. The guys at Linux * Screw have looked at three tools you may want to add to your Linux toolbox.
• Steven Rose: Removing Evolution Mail is NOT dangerous in the slightest… Some people want to remove Evolution from their Ubuntu installation, because they prefer another email client, and others are quick to predict doom and gloom if they even attempt to uninstall Evo. Personally I love Evo, but not everyone likes the same apps. Steven dumps some of the FUD and brings the truth of the matter of removing Evolution. And guess what, it doesn’t unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Although you can have my Evo when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
• Mark Brown: Full quoting. Yes, it refers to replying on email lists, but it’s not another rant about the right way to write a response. In fact he says nothing about replying above or below the quoted message, although Mark reminds me I need to spend another half minute (or less) before I hit Send on any email response.
• Jono Bacon: Change for Change. Jono’s got a great idea for some of the loose change we keep finding in our pockets and purses. I can’t wait to see it get started and make its way to Beantown. It’s a hell of a lot better idea than all of the stemmers I keep finding outside of stores and restaurants, but then I know some stemmers who make more money in a given day than I do.
• Dougie Richardson: Replacing Firefox. I admit it, the moment I saw his post title I flagged it to read later, but now that I’ve read it I knew I had to share it. Dougie needed something leaner to use on his netbook and looked at all the possibilities “from Epiphany to Opera”, and he decided to go with a Webkit browser. He looks at Midori and Arora in his post, complete with some screenshots. If you need a browser for a device with a smaller screen (and available memory) you owe it to yourself to read his post. He does bring up some bad news, namely that some apps in Ubuntu’s repositories aren’t exactly current, and while he doesn’t have a solution he does have some good information.
• Shane Fagan: Reply to Ballmers recent interview. You may have read or heard an interview with Steve Ballmers on cNet, especially his comparison with Mac about quality and price. Shane has a great response for Ballmers, and no matter what OS you prefer you should see what Shane has to say.

For those who voted for Mac4Lin in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, I’m afraid to say that they didn’t win. Anirudh Acharya, the main dev for Mac4Lin, does thank all their supporters and mentions a very nice surprise in the final tally. There was also a great article in Linux Magazine comparing Ubuntu 9.04 with Mac OSX, and while it doesn’t mention Mac4Lin it does present Ubuntu in a very nice light.

Baseball fans were made very happy last week with the news that Vin Scully, the voice of the LA Dodgers would keep working for one more year.You may remember that almost a year ago I posted the good news that he’d be working for this, his 60th year, and even if you hate the Dodgers you have to respect that man’s talent. There’s no better example of Suclly’s talent was shown just last month when Manny Ramirez his is pinch hit grand slam. Check out the video on that page if you need any more evidence of Vin Scully’s wisdom and class.

And for those who hate baseball and need a smile on this first Sunday in August, there’s a post by directhex from last weekend that I dare you to read and not smile at.

That’s a full lid. Have a good week, or at least have as good a week as you want to have.