UbuntuCat

A little backstory
Last week, my 256 MB Sandisk player died. I really liked that player. It was ugly, and it didn’t support free formats, but it was functional and small.

So I did quite a bit of online research on a replacement player. There were a few things I was looking for in a new player:

• Relatively cheap (nothing over US$200)
• FM radio
• Not terrible looking
• Long battery life
• Linux compatibility
• Support for open formats

My search brought me eventually to the Cowon iAudio 7, which fit all of those criteria. It was quite a bit pricier than my cheap Sandisk had been, but it was still under $200; it had an FM radio, and most reviews said the reception was pretty good; it didn’t look too bad in the pictures; its battery life is supposedly 60 hours; the Cowon website prominently includes Linux compatibility in the description (Linux kernel v2.2 or higher (data transfer only); and it supports both Ogg and FLAC.

First Impressions
Well, it arrived yesterday, and immediately my wife remarked that it was “cute” and I agreed with her. Despite most online reviews complaining about the iAudio 7 being too thick, I was surprised at how small it is. Yes, it isn’t as slim as the iPod Nano, but it isn’t a giant monster either. It’s more like a box than a flap, that’s all—a very small box, though. I was a little disappointed to see that the packaging did not list Linux under the system requirements’ operating systems (only Windows and Mac), considering Cowon makes no bones about mentioning Linux support on its website.

The Quick Guide that comes with it is quick indeed! It basically tells you nothing. It has pictures of the included parts (headphones, USB cord, player) and labels all the buttons (menu, play/stop, hold switch, etc.), and that’s about it. There is no manual explaining how to use the iAudio 7, and I couldn’t find one at the Cowon website either. Most of the reviews online (CNET, anythingbutipod, Amazon, NewEgg) gave me the impression that the controls were not intuitive but also not too hard to pick up. As a matter of fact, the controls make almost no sense. When you’re in the menus, Play/Pause goes forward (that makes sense) and Record goes back (that makes no sense). I accidentally enter Record mode while I was browsing the menus and started recording, but I didn’t know how to stop. I paused, of course, but there was no way for me to stop—I just pressed a bunch of buttons in the hopes of something working. One of the buttons got me back to playing music, but I had no assurance that I wasn’t simultaneously recording something at the same time. If someone can point me to a PDF manual (or even a website) explaining the iAudio 7 controls, I would be much appreciative.

Loading songs on to the iAudio 7 is easy. You plug it in, and it’s drag-and-drop. It has a bunch of top-level folders (I deleted the movie folder, as I’m pretty sure I won’t be watching movies on the one-inch screen) for text files, pictures, and music. I dragged about 4 GB of music into the MUSIC folder, and the transfer was fairly quick (USB 2.0, I assume). To test out the Ogg support, I redownloaded Mel’s Hey Girl album from Jamendo as Ogg instead of MP3. That worked out well. I’m slowly moving myself over to Ogg from MP3. It’s a nice free feeling.

I haven’t had a chance yet to test whether or not it lasts 60 hours, but I listened to it for about two hours and the battery meter hasn’t budged. I’ll update this review later with my iAudio 7 battery life experience. There is an annoying little bit with charging—you don’t know when it’s done unless you unplug the player. I’m assuming that once it runs out I can leave it in for about three or fours and it’ll charge. We’ll see. The only other minor bone I have to pick with the charging is the little flap that you open to get the USB cord in—it’s a little hard to open and doesn’t open very gracefully. If you have long fingernails (I don’t), it shouldn’t be a problem, though.

In terms of actual use (apart from the controls not making any sense), the playback is good. I’m no audiophile, but it sounds good to me, clearer than my Sandisk did using the same headphones. By the way, the headphones that come with the iAudio 7 are fine for normal people like me (not those who claim they can hear the difference between CD quality and 192 bitrate MP3). I prefer my own headphones, though, just for physical comfort.

The navigation is a bit annoying. When you try to press the Next button, if you don’t press it exactly the right way, the iAudio 7 decides you want to fast-forward instead of skip to the next song. It also took about three seconds to skip from one song to the next. That’s a long time to switch between songs. Granted, I had almost 4 GB of music together in one folder, but the player is a 4 GB player and should be designed to accommodate that kind of capacity. I upgraded the firmware in the player, and the three-second pause went away, but… A) the firmware upgrade was available as of September, so why didn’t they include it in the player I bought? Maybe it’s been sitting on the warehouse for almost three months. Who knows? B) There is absolutely no warning on the Cowon America website that the firmware upgrade will erase any music and preferences you have. The instructions just tell you to unzip the archive and copy it to the iAudio 7 and then restart the player.

One last note about the FM Radio: it sounds good (my Sandisk player had problems getting good reception for a couple of radio stations I listen to), but you don’t have the option to set your own presets, as far as I can tell. You can have the iAudio 7 scan the stations for the ones with the strongest signals, and then you’re stuck with those unless you manually tune without presets.

Summary Review
The Cowon iAudio 7 is a solid choice for those looking for a cute player that is definitely Linux compatible (no need for MTP plugins) and supports Ogg and FLAC music formats. The sound is good. The FM signal is strong. I definitely recommend a firmware upgrade the minute you open the thing (before you put any music on it), and if anyone knows how to make the controls make sense, please let me know! It has its kinks to be worked out, but maybe those will be taken care of in future firmware upgrades.

Read my follow-up review here

She thought she was doing everything right. She wanted to departition her computer and reinstall Windows. So she backed up all her files to an external hard drive, deleted all the partitions and reformatted as NTFS, then reinstalled Windows. She didn’t remember she still had her backup drive still plugged in, though, when she was doing the reformatting, so she ended up deleting her backup, too—years of work and lots of music and photos. She tried using a recovery program she found and was able to get some stuff back but not all of it (most importantly, her MS Office documents).

Well, she just hosted Thanksgiving dinner for us, so I brought over my toolkit (basically a Linux Mint CD and my own external hard drive) and got to work on it while we ate and did other stuff. The recovery process is pretty low stress but extremely time-consuming. I booted up Linux Mint, plugged in her external hard drive, plugged in my external hard drive, installed photorec, ran it, picked which drive to recover (hers) and which drive to save the recovered files to (mine), and then it took over three hours to scan her entire 160 GB hard drive for files. Afterwards, I copied the recovered files back to her drive (another two hours). Finally, I copied most of her files from the external hard drive backup back to her computer (another hour).

I’m amazed at how effortless photorec is. I’m also glad that once she realized her data had been deleted that she turned off the hard drive and didn’t do anything else… otherwise, I don’t think we could have gotten those files back.

So I caved finally and joined Facebook. While I like the functionality of it, I think it’s a little scary that one company is privy to that much information about people’s pasts and relationships. They know where you went to school, who you associated with, whom you still want to be in touch with, what you’re currently excited about. I did read their privacy policy and terms of use, and they seem okay, but it’s still nuts they even have all that information. I suppose, though, they do offer a service, and people find that service useful.

I signed up this morning (less than ten hours ago), and I already have fifteen friends. There’s an amusing aspect of the friendship approval process—you can specify how you know the person (went to school together, hooked up once, know through a friend, etc.), and one of the ways you can specify how you know the person while you’re approving her as a friend is I don’t know this person. That made me chuckle inside, because I know exactly what that’s for. It’s for the people who like to have as many “friends” as possible just for the status of it or the appearance of being well-liked or well-connected.

So far, though, I’m still wondering what’s so great about Facebook, apart from putting you back in touch with those friends you lost touch with in the first place. It seems like Friendster but with a more reliable server and more bandwidth. After setting up an account, logging in, adding a few friends, and customizing my preferences, I was still left (just as I’d been with Friendster) wondering, “Okay. So now what?”

Maybe I’ll change my mind. My wife is a Facebook addict, and maybe she’s giving me a preview of my life to come. I knew I’d get sucked into the Facebook cult sooner or later!

In the tired illegal downloading debate, there are few things the different sides can agree on. Is it stealing? Is it moral? Does it actually affect sales? Does it hurt the artists? One thing I think everyone can agree on (including the RIAA) is the need for a new distribution model. DRM (Digital Rights Management) isn’t really stopping anyone from pirating music right now.

It took the film industry a long time to embrace and make obscene profits from the VCR and eventually DVDs. As technology moves forward, so must the entertainment industry, and that includes record companies.

Here are a few ideas on how they can still make money and not prosecute downloaders or impose DRM on legitimate customers:

• Include “advertisements” in the songs themselves, much the way Hollywood has product placement in its movies.
• Flood filesharing seeds with low quality or screwed up versions of songs.
• Set up official download sites that are attractive, easy to navigate, full of high-quality downloads, and funded by advertisements.

In other words, make money the same way TV does. If people feel entitled to getting stuff “for free,” bombard them with advertising. I may be old-fashioned, but I still like browsing through a record store and picking out CDs.

I’m reading a book now called Hip Hop Matters by S. Craig Watkins. I came across a certain part about Master P that got me thinking. I don’t really want to retype that passage, so I copied and pasted a similar blurb from this online article: Master P: Hip-Hop Mogul Reveals - interview with the singer - Interview.

What Master P did finally agree upon made rap music history and made him a millionaire. A true rap pioneer, Master P agreed to a deal where Priority Records would be given 15 percent of the profits for distribution, while 85 percent of the money would go to No Limit. He also has complete ownership of the master recordings that will allow No Limit to profit from future sales such as catalogs and reissues. He negotiated No Limit movies the same way. He worked out a distribution deal with Miramax Films. He pays them a percentage to distribute, but he owns his movies, which include I Got The Hook-Up, Foolish and Hot Boyz.

One frequent defense of illegal music downloads is a self-righteous stick-it-to-the-man justification of “Well, the artist doesn’t even see any of the profits from album’s sales. All of that goes to greedy corporations.” So instead of giving the artist pennies and the corporations dollars, you’d rather give the artist nothing. Okay. But what about people like Master P? Master P gets $.85 on the dollar and owns the master recordings of his songs. And he’s not alone.

Paul Anka—the author of “My Way” (which Frank Sinatra made famous) and singer-songwriter of hits like “Puppy Love” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder”—also bought the masters of all his songs. He managed to negotiate them out from “the greedy corporations” and made himself a very rich man.

Ani DiFranco is an independent musician who made it big on her own label, Righteous Babe Records. While her overall sales may not match top-40 pop musicians, no greedy corporation is skimming her profits off the top. She is the corporation.

All of this wouldn’t be a problem in the pirates’ defense, except that I have never in the many online discussions of this topic seen any pirate say, “I carefully research to make sure I’m downloading only music from artists who are getting screwed over by greedy corporations. I definitely buy the albums of artists who reap most of the profits.” Not seldom. Never. So if you’re a music pirate, please stick to the other defenses, or just stop with the defenses altogether and admit you’re doing something illegal and possibly wrong. But please don’t spout any more bull about the artists not getting the profits unless you’re also going to say you research very carefully on which artists get screwed and which don’t.

I remember when a whole bunch of my friends signed up for Xanga. They were blogging like crazy, leaving comments on each others’ Xanga blogs and having a jolly old time. Well, they all encouraged me to read their Xanga blogs, but I couldn’t comment on their blogs without a Xanga account. So I created a Xanga account just to leave comments.

Then came the barrage of emails requesting I join Friendster. I held out for a long time. I held out for a very long time, but I kept getting the emails over and over again. The only way to stop the emails from coming? Join Friendster. So I joined. I even gave it a chance (Maybe this social networking thing isn’t so bad…). It was lame. Friendster’s server was slow or down all the time. And I just didn’t see what the point of the site was. Sure, you connect with some old friends you don’t talk to any more. Then what happens? Well, you’re connected, but you still don’t talk to each other.

The most recent fad among my friends is Facebook. They rave about Facebook. Well, for a while my wife held out. Then she spent a weekend away with some of our friends and came back a Facebook convert. That made me even more resistant. It’s like a cult! Now, my wife is “social networking” on Facebook with my friends because I’m not on Facebook. To be honest, I recognize that my wife is having more fun on Facebook than either of us ever had on Friendster (is it possible to have less fun than on Friendster?), but I just don’t like the pressure. Join us. Join us! That’s what I hear when someone says When are you going to sign up for Facebook?

Maybe some day I will join the cult, but it just feels so creepy to me, like some weird middle school clique, a pyramid scheme, or lemmings jumping off a cliff. Well, at least the lemmings seem happy.

Many hopeful migrants to desktop Linux expect Linux to be a cost-free version Windows without problems. It’s with that expectation that many of these potential convertees run back to Windows at the first sign of trouble… or just culture shock. Well, there is a free version of Windows called ReactOS. It’s done in partnership with the people who do Wine (the Windows compatibility layer for Linux).

For at least a year since I first heard of the ReactOS project, I’d always wondered how viable it is as a replacement for Windows. In theory, it’s built to have full compatibility with Windows binaries. It’s basically supposed to be open source Windows.

After trying it out, though, I have to say that the warning on the website (Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.3-RC is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature complete and is not recommended for everyday use.) is not just a disclaimer. It’s absolutely true. In fact, good luck running ReactOS for more than five minutes without it crashing on you.

The ReactOS download page has several options—an installation CD, a live CD, preloaded Qemu for Windows, and preloaded VMWare virtual machine. I went for the latter, which was only a 21 MB download. I had VMWare Player installed on Ubuntu, so I figured—why not?

Well, the bootup screen is black… looks a lot like Grub.

Then, you get some verbose loading stuff. The entire boot process, even in VMWare is fast. I didn’t time it, but it felt as if the boot time was about ten seconds.

You get a standard Windows-looking screen.

The Start menu looks a lot like Windows’ Start menu. The interface for ReactOS (again, even in VMWare) is snappy and feels like a lightweight window manager (more like Fluxbox than Gnome or KDE).

When you launch Explorer, you get the option for spatial mode and a split window.

Here it is with a split screen.

If you try to browse to the web, you have to install ActiveX first. Weird.

Ah, but if you try to actually visit a website (here I am trying to download Internet Explorer off the Microsoft website… then you get the freeze-up. Mouse cursor won’t move. You don’t even get a “blue screen of death.”

I tried booting it up again in VMWare. Trying to get to the web again gives me this wonderful screen.

So when they say it’s in the alpha stages, they’re not kidding. Stay away from ReactOS unless you’re a developer who can help. I think it’s not even ready for testing and bug reports.

If you want Windows, stick with Windows. If you want something else, then you can try Linux. Open source Windows full compatibility is far, far off.

Further Reading
Linux is not Windows
Here’s an idea - YOU make it more like Windows!

On a Linux forum, when you get into discussions of the benefits of open source over proprietary software, inevitably someone will say something to the effect of If you don’t like it, you can change it—that’s the beauty of open source. While that may be the beauty of open source for programmers, how does that benefit affect non-programmers?

I myself am not a programmer, so being able to modify the source code of a program is a dubious benefit for me. I do, however, enjoy several fringe benefits as a regular software user.

These are the main ways I benefit from open source:

• Low or No Cost
  Yes, it’s true. You can legally charge money for open source software, but very few people do, and the prices can never be exhorbitant (say, $500 for an office suite), because people can easily compile the source code themselves for less than $500. The cost you pay, if you pay anything at all, is usually marginal and covers the distribution costs, the packaging, the shipping, or support. I’ve never had to pay money for any of the open source software I use, though.
• Peace of Mind
  Free? Hm. Does it have spyware? Does it have adware? Is it a virus? Well, I’ve yet to come across an open source program that’s installed malware on my computer. I have, back in my Windows-using days, installed freeware (different from open source, by the way) that’s come with malware or at least nagware (Want to upgrade to the full edition? Your free trial is almost over!). I think this is a combination of open source program creators generally having good intentions and other open source programmers being able to examine the source code.
• Community Support
  This is a double-edged sword, of course. Some open source projects are funded by a company, but most are developed by a worldwide community of programmers and testers, meaning that if the project is successful enough, it’ll never die just because one company decides to discontinue it. It also means no company can lock you in to the way they want to do things. If a previously excellent open source project starts going in a bad direction, you can bet there are programmers out there who are working on a fork of the project.

  Here’s where the other edge of the sword comes in, though: someone has to do it. If the project isn’t funded by a company, it’s usually volunteer or subsidized by donations. So if no one’s interested in continuing the project, the project just dies or remains stagnant.

Interested? You may have already started using some open source programs—Firefox, Audacity, FileZilla, GIMP.

If you’re not a Linux user, there are still plenty of great open source programs for you to try out:

http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

http://www.opensourcemac.org/

I taught an Excel class yesterday to some of my co-workers. Usually they think all my memorized keyboard shortcuts are just too crazy, but I managed to convince them during the class of the benefit of keyboard shortcuts.

Here are a few things that helped:

• When I told them the keyboard shortcuts, I explained them very slowly, making sure they pressed each key and held it before telling them the next key to press.
• I showed them how quickly things could be done, and those who followed my instructions (highlighting with Control-Shift-Arrow) were able to highlight their data a lot more quickly than those trying to futz around with the mouse.
• Some of the mice in the training room we were in bad shape and were even harder to control than normally functioning mice.
• One of the key combinations I gave them was so complicated it become almost a fun joke, so people memorized it and wrote it down because it seemed convoluted (if you’re curious, the actual key combination is F2, Shift-Home, Control-C, Tab, Control-V).

Well, everyone walked away from that class happy. Ordinarily, though, when I show people keyboard shortcuts, they just shake their heads and reach for the mouse.

I’ve often heard it said on Linux forums that it can’t hurt to run Linux anti-virus just in case a Linux virus does get released into “the wild.” I also see that almost all Windows users I know run anti-virus and/or anti-spyware programs.

Am I naive in asking “Why?”

On the Linux front, yes, a Linux virus could get released into “the wild” at some point. Let’s say that happened on July 1 some year. Do you really think that on July 1 the Linux users with anti-virus will be more protected than the Linux users without anti-virus? The virus definitions would be updated on that day and enforced before the virus could do any damage? And if the definitions are updated on July 2 or July 3, couldn’t the Linux users without anti-virus just install the anti-virus within minutes? What extra protection does Linux anti-virus offer you? As for Linux anti-virus supposedly preventing you from forwarding viruses onto Windows users, how about just not forwarding people attachments you yourself did not create?

More importantly, does anti-virus or anti-spyware really do anything in Windows? I don’t use Windows regularly at home any more, but the few times I have booted into it, I haven’t contracted noticeable malware. And I do use Windows regularly at work, and I don’t have any malware either there, even without anti-malware programs running.

Nevertheless, I have a lot of friends and family members who continue to get viruses and spyware on their systems with noticeable slowdown, mysterious processes running, programs that won’t uninstall or shut down. Do these people have anti-*** running with the latest definitions updated? Hell, yes.

So my question to security experts out there (I am not one): does anti-*** software, particularly in Windows, do anything practical to prevent malware? Or does it just suck up more system resources? As far as I can tell, it’s better to not have anti-*** installed and just set up Windows with a limited user account than to have someone run as administrator and have all these useless anti-*** programs running and giving her a false sense of security.

How does the senate vote?