Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

I just resolved a problem which has been an annoyance for two years. I’m posting the details as robobait in the hopes it will help others.

Our family network includes a Samba file server hosted on an NSLU2 server appliance by Linksys (now a part of Cisco). A long time ago we changed to the Unslung open firmware for the NSLU2 (or “Slug”, as we call it).    It’s a wonderful combination, powered by a rich assortment of free software created by many volunteers. I appreciate their efforts.

But two years ago, I moved my personal computing from a laptop running Mac OS X 10.3 to one running Mac OS X 10.5. On the new 10.5 laptop, I noticed that the NSLU2 failed to respect file modification times. That is, if I had a file created on Dec 1, 2007 on my laptop, and I dragged it to a Samba volume hosted on the NSLU2, then the time stamp on the copied file was changed to the present time. The Dec 1, 2007 modtime was lost. Similarly, if I used touch -t from the Mac OS X command line to change the timestamp on a file hosted on the NSLU2 Samba volume, the operation failed. If I tried  sudo touch -t, that succeeded, just until another client viewed the file — at which point the timestamp snapped to the present again. However, if I copied a file resident on the NSLU2 Samba volume to another location on the volume, the timestamp was preserved.

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A colleague from Green College, UBC, freshly graduated with an MFA in Poetry, but also with work experience in editing and publishing, is looking for a job in the Lower Mainland. At a party yesterday, we talked about the Vancouver (British Columbia) social media scene, and how she can get plugged in to it, and make it part of her job search. I’ve posted my ideas below. Do you have other leads for newcomers to plug into the local social media scene?  Please post them in the comments. Maybe, together, we can build a useful resource for other seekers.

Urban British Columbia in general, and the Vancouver metro area in particular, has thriving technology and social media communities.  (There’s industry in there somewhere, also.) This community exists in part through face-to-face relationships, and in part on-line. Through this community, you can meet interesting people, learn what is happening in the industry, network for job leads, and of course have a good time.

There’s nothing terribly unusual about the techniques for plugging into this community as opposed to any other. But here is my advice for specific starting points.

Basic Identity and Persona

The first thing to have is an identity, a way for people to refer to you and link to you. From this identity you will grow an online persona.

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I’m giving another talk at the Vancouver Joomla User Group started up recently. This group started this summer, and is now attracting a steady level of participation. It’s great to see a Joomla! community developing. Here’s the coordinates:

Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database

Monday, 30. November 2009, 18:30-20:30h. At The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.

A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.

Agenda

• Introductions.
• Featured topic: Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database, by Jim DeLaHunt.
• Q&A.
• Door prize drawing.
• Networking.

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on “Competition and Investment“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog.  I have two more submissions, “Copyright and you (me)” and “Copyright and the test of time“, which I published in recent weeks.

Q: What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?

A: Three changes:

1. relinquish Crown Copyright
2. create legal structures for free culture, and industries based on it
3. don’t take on the job of defending obsolete business models

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I just figured out a solution for a problem setting up a piece of Windows freeware on my computer, and I’m recording it here as robobait so that others can benefit from it.

I use the wonderful Exact Audio Copy (EAC) software to rip my CDs to FLAC files, as part of moving our music collection onto a media server.  I had just uninstalled version 0.99pb3 (this thing has been “pre-beta” and version 0.99 for years!) and installed version 0.99pb5. I set the directory to which EAC writes its extracted files to be on my Samba file server. When I tried 0.99pb5, though, I observed that whenever I tried to copy tracks from the CD, an “Error Message” alert box would pop up, saying “File Creation Error !” What I expected, and what I recalled from using 0.99pb3, was that EAC would write the compressed files happily to the server directory.

The minimal test case to produce the error was to select one track from the CD, and then select the menu item “Action“… “Copy selected tracks” “Uncompressed“. The Windows system in question is a virtual machine running Windows XP on my Macbook Pro laptop.  I had set up EAC’s “Standard directory for extraction” to a UNC server path, let’s call it “\\samba\media\Music\untagged_flac\“.  I observed, by the way, that when I changed the destination directory to be something on my Windows C:\ drive, then EAC wrote the file with no problem. And interestingly, EAC had no trouble writing log files and cue files to the server directory using the UNC path, but it refused to write audio data files.

The workaround which succeeded for me was to map a drive letter to the UNC path. In my case, I mapped the letter “Z:\” to “\\samba\media\Music\“. Then, I set EAC’s “Standard directory for extraction” (under “EAC“… “EAC options“… “Directories” tab…) to “Z:\untagged_flac\“.  Then EAC happily wrote compressed music files to my network directory.

I think this write failure is a regression from 0.99pb3; I recall the UNC path working then. But I haven’t reinstalled 0.99pb3 to prove the point. If you try that experiment, please leave me a comment and tell me what you found.

There are other possible causes for the “File Creation Error !” alert box.  A couple I found were:

• Unpermitted leading “\” character in EAC’s “naming scheme” option (under “Filename” tab), per a hydrogenaudio thread “EAC: File Creation Error on first CD track”
• Filename or total file path too long (I don’t know the operative limit), per a hydrogenaudio thread “EAC pb5 directory problem causes File Creation Error”

May no-one else have to spend the time I spent diagnosing this problem! Happy exact audio copying!

P.S. my thanks to the developers of EAC, and of FLAC.exe, and all the other pieces of software in this marvelous free tool chain.

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on the “test of time“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations, because the government may fall (again) before Parliament gets a chance to pass a new bill. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog.  I have two more submissions, one on “Copyright and you (me)” which I published last month, and one which I’ll dribble out in the coming days.

Q: Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?

A: The largest single dynamic is the change in delivery of cultural works from physical containers (paper books, CD disks, celluloid film) to digital information (ebooks, music files, computer networks).

Physical containers are:

1. either immediately accessible by humans (books), or accessible via limited machines which did not copy the container.
2. expensive to duplicate, and expensive to transport. Continue Reading »

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A Vancouver Joomla User Group started up recently. We’re experimenting with what format will serve us well. For this month’s meeting, I’ll give a talk about staging servers (details below) and we’ll have plenty of time for networking and Q&A. I there there’s lots of room for more Joomla content in this town. Here‘s the coordinates:

Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process

Thursday, 8. October 2009, 18:30-20:30hAt The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.

A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on “Copyright and you“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations, because the government may fall (again) before Parliament gets a chance to pass a new bill. My submission may eventually show up on the official submissions page. Until then, here it is, for the record.  I have two more submissions which I’ll dribble out in the coming days.

Q: How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?

A: This topic should not just be about copyright, it should also be about culture. I absorb culture, some of it through copyrighted works, some through public domain or non-copyrighted works. I also create works: essays, blog posts, musical performances, even submissions to government consultations. Thus I am *both* a producer and a consumer.

All culture is built by mixing and innovating based on previous culture. Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” was based on German folks tales written down a few centuries before.

The purpose of copyright is to strike a balance: to allow a limited right to prevent copying, in exchange for a larger social and cultural good. In today’s Canada, this balance has been greatly distorted, in favour of the publisher and the corporation, against the vast majority of artists, against the public, and against the culture. Digital technology, extra-long copyright terms, and aggressive policies by industry groups mean that publishers have greatly expanded their power to prevent copying. The public interest and the culture are harmed.
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One of the many nice touches of the Django framework is that it provides tools and instructions to make a standalone Django documentation set from its distribution.  (Django is an application framework for the Python language that helps with database access and web application.)  Standalone docs are great for people like me who work on a laptop and are sometimes off the net. But I’m using Mac OS X, I get my code through Macports, and Django’s instructions don’t quite cover this case.  So I just figured it out.  Here’s the tricks I needed.  Maybe it will help you.

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What “twanguage” do you “tweet”?  Twitter, the buzzing conversation of brief web and SMS messsages, exploded into wide use in 2009. But just how wide?  To how many countries has it spread?  And into which languages?  I’m aiming to find out.

I’ve started a project named “Twanguages”, a language census of a sample of Twitter’s global traffic. I’m curious: which are the top languages? Are #hashtags localised? How does language correlate with location?  And which Unicode character is the most rarely used?

I’ll be  presenting our results at the 33rd Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC33), held in San Jose, California, on October 14-16, 2009. I have a place cleared for a Twanguages project page, and I’ll post interim results there as they become available (right now it’s only a placeholder). Stay tuned!

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