iPodding Along and a Cookie Quest

Well, I finally am part of the digital music player revolution with an iPod (a very surprising gift I received). It is very nice — great sound, lots of storage and a beautifully simple interface (I love the click wheel design), plus it has a 12 hour battery life, which may not be the longest, but it is progress in the right direction. The iPod works out great since it integrates with iTunes, can play iTMS M4P (AAC) music and even synchronize with my .mac account (which syncs my desktop address book, calendar and bookmarks between my phone, laptop and desktop). I'd looked at the Dell DJ and some others, but the iPod seems to have the best set of features for my usage.

Most of all, it will prove useful for photography. I love taking pictures and the iPod offers far more storage than an equivalently priced memory card for when I'm not able to download photos for a few days on a trip. This will allow me to quit using anything other than the highest megapixel rating on my camera.

Problem: I need a case to protect this fine little machine. Anyone here have a recommendation? I'm looking for something that will keep it safe from scratches, etc., and probably clip on my belt at times.

A question for Christopher: Did you ever get to try your fried Oreo (part I, part II)? I went down to the St. Charles Oktoberfest today, and I was surprised when I saw a booth serving fried Oreos. I decided to sacrifice myself as a test subject for the cause of finding out about what they are like. It was a terrible sacrifice.

I like Oreos and I like fried stuff from festivals. So for $1, I got two fried Oreo cookies (apparently of the Double Stuf variety). The cookies were dipped into batter (the same kind, I think, as they were using for funnel cakes) and then deep fried for a minute or so. Ample powered sugar was placed on top. The result was very good. The cookies had almost melted inside the batter, leaving a gooey chocolate and cream center inside and a sweet, crispy airy funnel cake shell outside. The best description I can come up with is a “chocolate funnel cake” (yes, that is a really creative description). If you like chocolate and funnel cakes, you will like fried Oreos. I'll be looking forward to running into another fried Oreo booth myself.

Bon appetite!

Spam Past Expiration

Weird news of the day: Spam Has Turned 100 years old. Shall we wish it a happy birthday? Nah, I don't think so.

Organizing

I spent a number of hours organizing my computer today. I have a bad habit of leaving old files in a mess when I reinstall my operating system. Some stuff is still sitting on a long retired Pentium II on its SuSE 7.1 installation that got left behind when I switched to Mandrake in 2001. I'm not going back that far just now, but I am dealing with several years worth of mess.

As it stood, I had a folder in my home directory on my G5 that contained everything from my PC prior to me removing Fedora and reinstalling Mandrakelinux 10.0 in June. Eventually a copy of that will go back to the PC (as well as remaining on the Mac), but first I wanted to merge that with the directory structure I was using on the Mac. To make matters more complicated, I still had a backup folder within that backup folder of stuff I had never reorganized from when I switched from Mandrake Linux 9.1 to Fedora Core. Each of those folders had files in a number of different places and few things were properly sorted. Some of the files were duplicates, since I had started copying and reorganizing the files last year. I decided it was time to redo them so that I could easily get to my documents in the future.

So far, I've organized about half of my text and word processor documents (alas some are in the incompatible KWord format, which will require some time to convert to something I can use on my GNOME and Mac desktops conveniently), 9,066 photos, several hundred images of other sorts (animated gifs, logos from projects, etc.), 1,030 musical tracks, 107 MPEG-1 video files (from my digicam) and numerous other tidbits. My goal, by the time I've finished, is to make it so that I can call up any particular file with minimal searching. I hope I'm successful!

On another subject, today is Wictory Wednesday. It is too late to donate to the Bush campaign, but don't forget to volunteer or do other things to help the President's campaign. I'm skipping the Wictory Wednesday blogroll for today, since it will make this mostly non-political post too long. I'll post it tomorrow.

Help Me Keep Outlook Out!

My church's office currently has two users using Outlook, two using Outlook Express and two using Thunderbird. Our new office administrator wants to replace the Outlook Express and Thunderbird installs with more copies of Outlook… and, I think, get a server to run Exchange on. This, obviously, is the opposite direction I was hoping we'd move it — it just means more security issues, and probably more broken systems for me to repair.

So, I need your help, ASAP. Does anyone know of a good groupware solution that will provide functionality comparable to Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Calendar? Or barring a Mozilla solution, some other Outlook alternative for Windows. What I mean is that we need shared calendars, shared address books, etc. The server can run GNU/Linux or something else, but the clients must be Windows. It must be as easy to use (or nearly as easy) as Outlook.

Is there such a solution? I don't think OpenGroupware or Kolab work with Mozilla to provide what needs to be provided, but correct me if I'm wrong. I can't imagine having to deal with a Microsoft server and a bunch of easily broken into Windows XP systems at church — that would be a mess!

Help!

GNU/Linux's Missing App for the Masses

GNU/Linux is great. But it is suffering in one area. I realized this when I started using Mac OS X and noticed that this kind of thing existed and worked well. I've now noticed it even more since I moved my mother over to GNU/Linux last week and found out she is not very pleased with this one part of GNU/Linux. What is it I am referring to? Photo organization and downloading tools!

They stink, for the most part, in GNU/Linux. Badly. Bring out the Glade Plug-ins bad. Open the windows and leave the house for a week bad.

iPhoto blasts away the competition, but fortunately, I'm not trying to get Mom moved over from a Mac. I wouldn't have even contemplated a move if she had a Mac. On a Mac things “just work.” But, she didn't use a Mac, she uses (well, used) Windows. She has a “Kodak EasyShare” camera with a camera dock, and she used Kodak's software that automatically downloads the photos and organizes them when you press a button on the camera dock. Needless to say, that software doesn't exist for GNU/Linux.

Linspire (fka Lindows) has been working on something called Lphoto and I thought perhaps that would work well. Mandrake's “dynamic” tool automatically sticks an icon on your GNOME or KDE desktop to launch gtkam or some such, but that isn't anywhere near automatic downloading and gtkam's interface is horrid at best. So, I edited the hotplug config to make Lphoto come up automatically. Kodak had made a poor clone of iPhoto, so I was hoping another poor clone of iPhoto might do the trick. Unfortunately, at least for now, Linspire's clone is worse than Kodak's. A lot worse.

But, it seemed to do the trick. Until yesterday, when I found out that it wasn't working right any longer. I went to check out my mother's computer and lo and behold, it took about 30 minutes to download 177 photos. I doubt I need to point out that such “speed” is pitiful. I tried some various ideas, including checking out flphoto (another gphoto2 based tool, like Lphoto). Flphoto, which has no relationship to Lphoto is way faster, which is bizarre since they both use gphoto2, but it has no way of keeping a list of albums together.

Finally, I've run into digikam, a program for KDE, which seems to run fine under GNOME too. It finally seems like something that is half way decent with some basic enhancement and effect tools and quick downloading. But its interface, like most KDE programs (click to read my editorial on that issue), is cluttered by too many features. Lots of features are nice, but it needs a cleaner way of displaying them, at the very least; iPhoto offers lots of functionality, but it isn't overwhelming even for a newbie. For now, I think it will work much better than any alternative I can find, but it seems amazing that no one has bothered to write a decent photo tool that mimics the iPhoto (or the Kodak Easyshare) interface and actually works right.

Well, maybe I'm being harsh on digikam. It looks like it has some nice stuff, but after one has used iPhoto it is hard to tolerate lesser programs. While Kodak's Easyshare software might not merit critical praise for its UI, my mother feels the same way about her migration from Easyshare to the abyss of Linux camera software. GNU/Linux developers really should quit developing the umpteenth Tetris clone or text editor and instead consider improving gtkam, digikam or Lphoto so that users will actually have a photo tool that the average user can deal with and everyone can enjoy without being envious of Mac OS and Windows users.

I'll post in a week or two if digikam improves the situation at all.

The MySQL License Question

MySQL AB's namesake database is a package that many would list among the crown jewels of Free Software. The Swedish company's database has been deployed over five million times by the company's own count. Yet, some, quite legitimately wonder if certain wording on the MySQL site might indicate the company is backing away from Free Software, and the GNU General Public License. We (OfB) wanted to know, so I contacted MySQL AB, the FSF and others to find out; read what I found at OfB.biz

Cedar.ServerForest.com Status

Since I know a number of ServerForest users are aware of (and I suspect read — and some I know read for that matter) this blog, I thought I'd post this status update here:

At 10:00 this morning CDT [GMT-600], Slashdot.org began linking to two articles on the Open for Business web site. This has caused temporary connectivity problems for HTTP connections that may impact your ability to view all sites on Cedar. The server has remained online the entire time and the problems appear to be clearing up as of 12:30 CDT.

Any further updates will go in the comments.

Why GNOME's Got it Right

Ed wrote earlier this week about a project known as GoneME that seems to be quite upset with GNOME's moves to create the simplest user interface possible for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like systems. While I commented a bit in his blog entry on the matter, I decided it was high time for me to exposit on the issue (I had been planning to for some time now). Thus, I have posted an article entitled Why GNOME's Got it Right on OfB. Take a look and give your two cents here.

Moving Forward with the War Against SPAM

I posted the following to CS-FSLUG and CMUG and I thought asisaid readers might be interested as well. Help me out in the war against SPAM by responding in the comments! Also, please consider posting a link to this on your blog — if the news spreads, maybe we can get more support for this project.

Hi everyone, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but I've found a really troubling occurrence over the past year. Christians [are] using spam as a medium for advertising. And, I'm not talking about variations of the Nigerian scam.

For instance, I've been signed up for several “Christian” newsletters that appear to be genuine, and even one from a well known Christian publisher, without my consent. One sends me three copies of each issue of the newsletter.

I could just unsubscribe, but I think that — in the long run, anyway — fails to accomplish anything. These organizations are still using very disturbing means to get out their message. Thus I got an idea: a blacklist of Christian Spammers. I'll create a list of all of the organizations who seem to be doing this and place them on them on the web. The page will encourage Christians to avoid these organizations, or at least their e-mail services, until such time as they “repent” of this. I will then contact them and provide them with a simple way to be removed: delete any and all subscribers they have added through means other than legitimate opt-in sign ups.

Obviously, they could lie and fail to delete all of the subscribers, but there is a simple way to test this: I will contact them using an address other than one that they presently have. Thus, the only way they can remove me (and thus convince me that they have “done the right thing”) is to remove all unsolicited subscribers (well, there are other means, but at least I won't make it easy). [Likewise, if others provide me with reports, they can let me know if the company quits spamming them after I contact them.]

The reason I'm posting this is that I'm hoping to get some more reports of Christian spammers. Especially ones who repeatedly send spam out — the kind that perhaps spam you every week or every day (as some do to me). It is my hope that when they are publicly confronted about this, they will relent (my attempts at private correspondence have failed to get the desired results).

There are two reasons I see for doing this: (1) I just really despise spam. I get so much of it, my mailbox would be useless if not for client side spam filtering and SpamAssassin on the server. (2) I don't want non-Christians to be getting spammed by Christian organizations and thus start grouping Christians with the less tasteful groups that usually spam. I'm sure some mean well by this, but its wrong all the same, and I think it would be good to put a stop to it before it gets any worse.

So, what do you say? Would you send those spammers' organizational web sites, e-mail addresses, etc. my way?

-Tim

If you prefer to send reports by private e-mail to me, that is fine as well. I will not share your name with spammers either way.

Lapbert Has Problems

My trusty old Dell laptop (“Lapbert”) seems to have problems. It's PC Card network card can't establish a connection. Worse, I didn't realize that until I entered all this month's invoicing data so that it would be ready for printing and e-mailing. So I now have to redo it all. By hand. Soon.

After I get done with that, I need to figure out how serious the problem is. I hope it isn't too bad.