C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I'm copying my MP3 collection from my Windows computer to my Linux computer. I'd like to have it all in OGG Vorbis format. For a while I had a program on Windows that changed them from one to the other, but it was shareware and expired. I tried installing a free open source program on Linux to do this but it's one of those programs that doesn't appear in the Applications menu. So it's apparently intended for use from the command line.

Of course that would involve finding the executable in the filesystem first, I guess. In a command line interface you are walking through a subterranean network of perfectly dark tunnels. Instead of a flashlight or lantern, you are provided with an infinite supply of camera flashbulbs called the ls command. I prefer searching the filesystem through the graphical browser. I figure at least I can find the darn executable, then I can go into the shell and start up the program.

I have been informed that programs are found in the usr/bin directory, but all the executables there are named cryptically. As I go through clicking every one, nine tenths of them do nothing. Anyway, let me know any advice you might have, from any approach you desire.

SWEET LARD AND HEAVENLY BUTTER. Streampad, the free streaming music service on the web, hath delivered unto me this day a live classical concerto based on sounds from the Windows operating system.

I should have included this in my recent list of ways Linux is like theology. You can't criticize Linux because somebody somewhere made their own version of Linux yesterday morning before breakfast which is intended to not have that problem; and they think you're criticizing them. But when I mean Linux, I mean the mainstream. I mean the thousands and thousands of open-source OS devotees and all the things that they really do have in common. Yes, there's variety, but they really do have certain things overwhelmingly in common. So do people of faith, from the Ayatollah to a little old lady down the street. More about that in a moment.

There are a lot of people telling me Linux is ready for everyone to use as a desktop system. But when I describe the experience I end up having which is not ready for the non-expert, and complain that the situation has been misrepresented, some other open-source OS advocates will stand up and say "hey, where are you getting that? Nobody's saying that. I never said that. I never heard any Linux supporter tell you that. Nobody said it was ready for you."

Well here's a link to another one.

( Read more... )Similarly, a secularist can't criticize faith without immediately being pounced on by religious progressives who made up a new-and-improved religion yesterday before breakfast and now consider it normal. "Hold on," they say, "who said god was authoritarian, or faith and reason aren't compatible? What? When? Huh? What? Nobody said that." Um, how about this: how about almost everybody ever. That's like inventing a new operating system yesterday before breakfast that nobody heard of, and isn't compatible with Debian or RedHat or anything, and makes you start over from scratch.

"I came up with a totally new mental practice and I'm calling it faith. So, don't criticize the mental practices referred to by Christian Supremacists and Iranian clerics as faith! That word is off-limits, or else I couldn't have my own faith! Just oppose their mean and irrational actions!" Where do you think actions come from? Beliefs. If beliefs can't be criticized and weighed and judged, you're fighting the symptoms instead of the disease.

Imagine that I am -- metaphorically -- in armed combat with the Family Research Council or somebody like that. I will never hassle you about your religion or even mention it to you until you run up and pull my weapon out of my hands. If you do that, you know what? If you stand between me and the theocrats, fuck your precious faith. Fuck it in and around the ass region and that vicinity. Do religious progressives have any idea what price they're asking us to pay? Whatever benefit is gained from progressive religion isn't worth leaving unopposed the problems that mainstream religions tend to have in common. That would be a horrific cost. We're playing with grown-ups and the stakes are higher than the games you're playing. When I say "faith" I mean the awful mental sleight of hand and self-delusion that is actually practiced every day by the six billion people who never heard of the progressive religion you made up yesterday. I complain about the shit I have to put up with. If you're not going to help fight that fight, so that you can go on smoking your spiritual weed, at least stop trying to disarm us of the most important weapon: I raise my hand and say "excuse me abortion clinic bombers and terrorists and legislators, faith is make believe."

I am pleased to report that hope pings eternal in the Linux-for-humans breast.

The problem with installing an application from CD to the laptop was a defect on the disk. My frustration was before I found the package manager, or to borrow a phrase I once heard netmouse use, "the Magical Man that Gets Things Done." The Ubuntu folks on the IRC channel assure me that new users are not expected to compile source code or hack scripts every time they want to install applications. It is not normal and accepted anymore and they do not want me to just get used to it. Tux Racer is not a flagship desktop-user product and should not be taken as representative of the effort to compete with Windows or Mac. Also, R's laptop has connectivity problems because it has buggy ethernet hardware and there is something idiosyncratic with the way the Gateway Solo 5300 talks to wireless cards. Linux can't detect what isn't there.

( Read more... )Ubuntu does not suffer from the design philosophy that turns the entire computing experience into guessing a series of what amount to cryptic passwords. There do exist builds of Linux that are ready to replace Windows or Mac-- if you're lucky with hardware compatibility and go directly to the Ubuntu-specific community when you need help.

Emboldened by these successes, I am prepared to venture into unsafe territory and begin to learn more ambitious things.( Read more... )

I can't get any sleep thinking about it so I might as well express it. At least I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

I had a huge epiphany today about Linux. I sat there and said "what the hell am I even doing this for?" Remind me again (I asked myself), what is the benefit in this, to me? When is the last time Windows crashed? I can't remember. What do I want to run on Linux that I can't run on Windows? I have Firefox, Open Office and The Gimp on Windows. This week I've been using free, open source desktop publishing, video and audio editing software on Windows and it's been a wonderful experience. Not to mention the countless free and open source web services. My support for free and open source software is as high as ever.

Except I no longer want to run Linux. What finally broke me on it was not the problems. All operating systems have problems. It was the horror of the solution. It was presented as normal, accepted, and even a positive. That was when I realized: "The promised land is never going to come. I am already here. This is it and I don't like it. This is normality. This would be happening if I bought a new computer with Ubuntu preinstalled and bought a year's worth of tech support. I cannot get around using the command line interface."

I am only lazy in a good way, the way that keeps you from chopping down a tree with a herring. It occurred to me, why should I learn command line? What do I gain? I thought I was getting a free operating system, but there are financial costs and there are work costs. From my perspective the cost to benefit ratio makes no sense! I would spend a lot of unpleasant time learning something I don't find interesting, in order to accomplish... well... I honestly have no idea. I have to take people's word for it what vague and nebulous benefits there are to this command line. I haven't needed it since DOS, and DOS is not something I want to go back to. Ever.

As those who know me are aware, I react very strongly to disillusionment. I should not have said in the comments to my last entry that Linux "broke" the computer. The most exquisite tool is just as good as broken when I apply it to the wrong problem. When I have a step down from my happy and content Windows experience, rather than a step up, then from a very context-dependent point of view it's kind of like I broke my experience. Linux doesn't "work" in the sense of not needing you to hold its hand. You know? The earth, the sun, my hearbeat, Palm OS, Firefox, these work. When your heartbeat needs you to "hold it's hand" with a pacemaker, it's broken. When your heart keeps asking you to tell it to beat with a command line interface you could sort of say it's working, in that you're not dead, but it seems your standards have shifted weirdly. "You know how important it is to be in the driver's seat of your hardware; we can't have autonomous heartbeats because you never know when you might need to hide your presence from the supernatural hearing of ninjas." I don't want to lose CD autoplay, or associating file types with actions, or lists of clickable options. I don't want to lose prompts and actions attached to every point in the interface, from which I can learn what to do next.

Well, it didn't take long to realize what had been motivating me in the first place-- rhetoric. All the coolest people were, and still are, in open source software. What I was gaining (in my mind) was solidarity with an idealistic social movement. Viva la teçhnōliberáčion. I don't want anticompetitive corporations to own the whole world with intellectual property, which in the future will be just about the only kind of property there is. Justice, freedom, monopoly-busting, equality, democracy, global brotherhood, access for the little guy-- it might as well have been goddamn control of the goddamn means of goddamn production, if you can believe that. Anything but what I could actually do with a tool! How embarrasing. Oh well. Lesson learned, and not for the first time. Now I have to make sure not to be a fool and have to learn it again.

Victory! Dan DeSloover from Monroe Linux User Group has gotten cosette_valjean's laptop to work with the network. Ironically, I recently installed Ubuntu on it to fix the difficulty we had with getting WinXP to network. I am typing this on Linux. Awesome!

Reason #1. The ability to get good things done.

The internet is a world I spend a lot of time in. I'll say to a friend "this page of our organization needs to say this instead of that" and they'll direct me to somebody who is a gatekeeper when I'd rather just have the power to Do It. I found out recently from Blasted Bill and phecda that unless the cable company objects, a private consumer could actually host a web site in one's own home on a perfectly normal computer. My cousin iamgeek revealed to me that a "web server" is a piece of software, not hardware. It even comes bundled with Linux!

Not that it does me any good, yet. All too often (such as when I got a paid LJ account and looked at the features) I read jargon like CGI and Apache and PHP which, until yesterday, I assumed to be a special type of computer hardware only available to ISPs. No longer will I slink away in defeat at their mere mention. Not even when the so-called "Beginner's" Guide/Overview to Python contains gibberish like "object-oriented" and "regular expression" in its first few sentences. There's gotta be a class I can take, but how do I choose which one to take when programming, using a UNIX command-line interface, and web administration, all seem to blur together? Where does one of them end and another begin?

Reason #2. Friends.

So there are several problems that learning how to program will eventually solve, someday. But I want to be a hacker, at least an initiate, because wherever all the coolest and most interesting activities are going on, one half is cool and interesting and the other half is unintelligible. This is a sign that I have no earthly business not being a hacker.