Purge

J’ai retrouvé le mot de passe de ce blog après quelques 5 ans de négligences.  Je vais purger la plupart des posts dans les jours qui viennent, non pas pour faire de la place, mais parce qu’oublier fait partie de la vie.

VirtualBox on Gutsy

I got into a limited flamewar with one of the commenters on this blog a few months ago when I commented on the fact virtualization features added to Gutsy were of little use to the common desktop Ubuntu user.  I can’t find the specific thread back again to admit defeat: I was flat wrong, virtualization is GREAT, even for simple users like myself (ie not a developper).

I installed VirtualBox to run XP and Office so I could use my main Ubuntu box to check Word docs (with all of the nice features like Track Chnages) and large Excel models and shoot them back to my colleagues.  I tried OO but that did not work, esp. with regards to presentation.

VirtualBox is simple to install and runs XP really nicely.  The hardest part is to understand the virtualization concepts (guest, host…) and make sure you do enable USB, sound AND install guest additions.  If you are in search of the right how-to, I would suggest the VirtualBox article in the French Ubuntu Documentation center which, as usual, is fantastic.

It is incredible, actually: XP is easier to run and administer when virtualized on Linux than on its own.   I have access to more graphical options (size of screen) than when it was installed in dual boot on the Ubuntu box which I am writing this post on.  VB can manage the XP disk size dynamically meaning there is little downside to giving XP quite a bit of room as it will be used only when needed….  Finally, XP does not have to be rebooted, as you only load a snapshot of the OS state, meaning it takes about 30 second to launch VirtualBox and start working! Amazing.  It remains to be seen whether it is truly stable or whether I have to "reboot" XP every other day.

I have found the only downside to be those pesky activation processes XP and Office throws at you: I won those copies but MSFT seems to think I need to waste half an hour with support on the phone, just to make sure I did not steal them.

Has anyone out there had a better experience (speed, stability…) with VMWare or QEMU? Should I try them on for size as well?

Finally, legal, DRM-free music off the web

Amazon does not let you buy DRM-free MP3s off their web site if you live in Europe, so no Steve Adey for me.

Deutsche Gramophon just opened their own perfect little shop on the web, though, and they do allow lowly Europeans to get their fill of classical music, DRM-free and ripped to a decent 320.  The only peeve I have is that I am more of an Ogg guy: MP3s, at that rate, tend to sound just as good but are way larger, but that’s OK.

Albums are cheap, too, with old issues priced around EUR10.  I finally got my hands back on Levine’s Carmina Burana, which I had on tape 20 years ago and hadn’t been able to purchase on CD.  I don’t think it was truly OOP, it’s just that I hadn’t been able to track it down again.  Well, I can hear Anderson’s voice in all her crystalline beauty back again!

This has to work.  There is no other way for the music business.  Will the pirates respect that and not flood P2P sites with DG’s back catalog?  In the case of classical music, yes, I believe it should work.  For rock, I remain skeptical.

Silicon Valley and Tinsel Town

I tend to refrain from negative posts because I generally do not find them very interesting, but I do need to get something off my chest.

When I was a VC, I had to interact quite a bit with Silicon Valley (VCs, bankers and entrepreneurs alike), whether as a source of ideas, news, deals, money, you name it.  I of course travelled there quite a few times and loved the weather, the geography and the sense of it being the center of my beloved industry, IT.

Something always bothered me though: as an avowed European player, I always felt quite a bit of haughtiness on the part of the SV people I met.  It was not xenophobia, people in Silicon Valley are *very* open to people from outside the US.  It went deeper than that: if you weren’t part of the Valley scene, you were a bit player and could not understand things as well as people who lived and worked somewhere between SF and San Jose (Jim, Andy, yes, I am talking about you).

I worked out of the Boston office of a large VC fund for a while and it was the same, the difference being that the East Coast VCs actually felt they were better than SV, themselves.

I think this arrogance is exploding on the blog scene, and I think the worst offender is the celebrated Marc Andreessen.  His blog is interesting and Marc is indisputably an industry luminary but sometimes he just goes on and explain how Tinsel Town should be rebuilt on the Silicon Valley image, thus showing to the rest of the world how Silicon Valley has become Hollywood: the same insularity, the same belief they have cracked the code and are the Masters of the Universe whose model can be used to solve all of the World’s problems.  Doesn’t that also remind you of Wall Street in the 80s?

If you want to have a feel where this might lead (beyond the groupthink), read Indecent Exposure : A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street.

A special request

Could This Mortal Coil please record a cover of Steve Adey‘s Mississippi?  The song is screaming to be rethought using IWR‘s famed reinterpretation skills.

Gutsy

I switched to Gutsy about a week ago. Except for 40+ new packages that need to be installed every day, it looks as though the system is already pretty stable. Except for Compiz, but that was to be expected. I really wonder of that piece of software can be made part of 7.10, what with the LTs thing.

Anyway, my biggest surprise is how little changes from 7.04 to 7.10. Gnome 2.20? I could not tell the difference. OO 3.x? I use GNUmeric and AbiWord. Evolution? I use TB and SB… The list goes on and on.

USB microphone

This post won’t be of any interest but people stumbling on this blog from a Google search with the words Skype Ubuntu and USB microphone in it.

If, like me, you use Ubuntu and Skype and are trying to use a AK5370 Logitech Desktop Microphone (this one), you may have run into a simple issue: you have to scream into your microphone for people to hear you on the other end.  It was most vexing for me because I had previously solved that particular problem a few months ago when I did a clean Edgy reinstall and I could not, for the life of me, recall what the fix was.

It gets worse: most of the Skype and ALSA/OSS FAQs out there advise you to do horrible things to your computer to make sound work in it and all of the solutions I tried at best did not improve the situation and at worst…  well, necessitated a bit of clean-up.

The solution is simple.  Very simple.  Right-click on the volume control widget at the right top end of your screen.  Go to Volume Control (sorry if the translation is not fully accurate, I use Ubuntu en français).  Your are presented with a number of controls, put the microphone one at maximum level.  It is not over yet!  Now, go to File/change device, choose "AK5370" and max it out too…  You are done.

Hope this helps.   I know it will help me in the future, when I do another clean reinstall of Ubuntu and find out I have once again forgotten this simple solution.  The benefits of old age…