Dropping WMA for Ogg

I switched from MP3 a few years back (after extensive testing) and have been a happy WMA user for a long while.  Since MSFT won’t provide native WMA codecs on Linux (amazing!) and I switched my music server to Ubuntu (that old machine won’t run Vista and even XP was a bit of a stretch…), I am switching to Ogg (0.9 if you want to know; I sure can’t hear the difference with 0.8 but it means I have a safety buffer if my hearing improve tremendously in the coming 10 years!). 

That was before that MP3 patent case was finally ruled last week.  Switching to Ogg feels like the right “political” move, although I would not mind remaining under MSFT’s legal umbrella as a WMA user: I am really worried about Xiph getting its ass sued by Alcatel/Lucent and/or Fraunhofer.  Oh well, Ubuntu might also get sues by MSFT because of its reliance on Mono so…

Intellectual Property

What is going to be the aftermath of the LU/MSFT trial?  From what I can read here or here, this is not going to stop anytime soon, and Apple, Creative and others are in Alcatel/Lucent’s crosshairs.  Of course, there is quite a bit of irony involved, what with Steve B.’s recent hardball tactics vis-a-vis Linux, implying Samba and Mono were infringing MSFT’s IP…  But I don’t think Ogg is out of danger yet, these issues are just too complex to think that open source won’t be affected somehow (yes, I have read Ogg’s legal FAQ, just the fact they feel they have to post such information is a sign where are in patent insanity land).  The patent situation is getting completely out of hand in the US (software patents? WTF?) and Europe is following close behind: the IP religion of big business is crushing the ability of smaller companies to compete and fight spurious claims in a court of law.  It is good to see Redmond getting bitten in the ass by the beast they helped to unleash.  How about patent reform, now?

Fooled by Randomness

I picked up this book at Brentano’s, they had a whole stack of them in a business section that is usually fairly dull and I have found myself surprised by how good it is.  It is not that Taleb proposes entirely new theories of the flaws in human cognition but rather how well he packages some insights which you can read about in a lot of other recent popular science books, like The Moral Animal (a depressing read, a must), Blink (entertaining but a tad shallow), applies them to finance and broadens their applicability to a host of new   themes, like criticism of post-modernist theories.  He also confesse to a love of poetry, quel courage!

As an entrepreneur, it is very sobering to read his take on risk taking and the probability/payoff mix of starting a new business…

Taleb is a native French speaker but apprently wrote the book in English and I have to say it does show sometimes (like in a few posts on this blog I am sure), with long, meandering sentences and a flowery use of the language that I find very interesting but that native english speakers may find strange!

MetaTracker

I uninstalled Beagle: it was just impossible for me to make it work.  Great ideas but it still has ways to go before I can use it.

Tried MetaTracker, even though I had plenty of misgivings: it does not index my emails yet, but works great on many other file types and was a breeze to set up.  I am definitely looking forward to the next release and am hoping it finds its way into Ubuntu soon (I am guessing it can’t be included in Feisty this late in the process?).

Dugg

This post somehow got Dugg over the week-end.  Must have been a pretty slow week-end from a news perspective.  Page views doubled.  Many thanks to my (unknown) benefactor: I don’t make any money from page views on this site, but a few reactions from the Digg crowd were interesting.  I guess I will have to sharpen my writing (and thinking) from now on.  To summarize my (fairly muddled) point: there is no comparison between the user experience on the two systems but the stability of a distribution like Ubuntu and the availability of useful third-party software on GNU/Linux makes it a viable alternative to Windows for business types like me.  It wasn’t so even very recently and that is a big change for MSFT, especially as it is trying to convince people to fork fresh cash for Vista.  If I have to switch systems anyway, why not go the Linux route?

Beagle and desktop search on Ubuntu

I like Windows Desktop Search and trying to replicate the experience on Ubuntu is not easy.  I don’t do grep very well.   MetaTracker is the hacker’s choice but I just don’t think I have the time.  Beagle sounds great but it is really still in beta and that not even counting some of the darn “optional” software it needs to parse .doc, .ppt, .xls etc.

Also, Beagle is based on Mono and you are basically considered an apostate by the Free Software Church and its followers just by thinking about installing it on your GNU/Linux system, thus little documentation and support for it is available on the web.  Considering some recent Ballmer’s comments, I would worry too.

Ubuntu Edgy and Slim part deux et demi

So, SlimServer is supposed to work on Ubuntu, and it does!   Problem is, Slim’s own install instructions are a bit short.  So here are mine:

* In Synaptic, make sure you have Universe, Main and Multiverse checked (tab Categories, then Repositories)

* Then add the Slim repositories in the tab Third Parties.  I chose  Testing:

deb http://debian.slimdevices.com testing main

The whole list of Slim repositories is available here.

Then you can simply search for Slim in the Synaptic search field and install slim with all its dependencies and it will work.  At least it did for me.

A few words:

* Yes, you can also do it from the Terminal.  I did it once and it took me a while to get it right (I was a complete Ubuntu n00b then, it was a great way to learn about repositories), but I just think Synaptic works fine.

* If you use WMA as your encoding format (like yours truly), then you are not completely in the clear yet and need to follow these instructions.  Good luck, this is clearly not as straightforward as the Slim install.  For some reason, SoftSqueeze won’t work with this hack, but the audio comes out fine on an SB3.  I still need to tune FFMPEG precisely, but Dan’s instructions do get the job done.  Let me know if it helps!

Launching today

I might have a bit more time to blog in the coming few days, now that we are launching our site at: www.voozici.com. The site is in French at the moment so the English-speakers out there will have to wait a few weeks. It is a local web site anyway, so you probably won’t find it useful unless you live or plan to travel to France in the near future.

In a nutshell, voozici.com is a social networking site to review small, local businesses, restaurants, plumbers, you get the idea. The focus is on the community, not so much on the search functionnality, because we feel the community is what people want out of a site like this. Just drop me a line of you want one of the beta logins, although we will be opening to the public fairly quickly anyway.

Slim on Ubuntu

By the looks of it, many people are finding my blog while searching for instructions to install SlimDevices on Ubuntu. I will be posting my notes here soon, but be reassured, it is pretty easy: even a n00b like myself got it to work, albeit for a short while only!

In the meanwhile, you may want to try to Slim on FreeNAS, which looks like it is moving along pretty quickly. If it works for you, a comment below is in order.

Ubuntu 6.10 with NoMachine NX Server

I wasted a few hours trying to install FreeNX on my Ubuntu box yesterday, I was feeling a bit under the weather so it was not as though I was wasting time anyway.

I never could get it to work properly, so I gave up and went commercial, so to speak, and got NoMachine’s NX Server to work in about 1 hour (but it did help that I had spent so much tile trying to get FreeNX to speak SSH, and I knew what the options meant). So long VNC, NX *rocks* (except that it crashes my Gnome login screen?).

There is a larger point at work here: I am still a Microsoft fan and I think that, as a firm, they create great products. The thing is, I never had as much fun with my PCs (DOS, Win3.1, ME, etc.) as I have had with Linux/Ubuntu. I can’t really figure out why, but Linux/Ubuntu reminds me of the way I felt the first time I used a Mac, back in 1988: the sense of power, the sense that borders had been crossed in terms of what was possible, etc. Linux puts you in the driver’s position, something that Windows, because it has to reach to so many million users probably can’t do anymore, at least not commercially.

I may just skip Vista and move all of my PCs to Ubuntu, especially if Feisty improves on Edgy. What does it mean for MSFT if guys like me (business users) start switching?