Wow!

About a month ago, my hero Glenn Beck had actor, writer, artist, etc. William Shatner on his television program for an hour-long interview. I missed it and didn't record it so I was very pleased to find out it was re-run this last Friday and got snagged on my DVR.

Wow!

That interview was just amazing and, surprisingly, contained almost no Star Trek content whatsoever. There were some clips from Star Trek shown when they were talking about Shatner's reputation for "overacting" but that's about it.

What did they talk about for an hour if not Star Trek? Some politics, some philosophy, some Shatner history, and alcoholism (Shatner's third wife suffered from alcoholism and it ended up claiming her life.)

Maybe I enjoyed it so much because it was just an almost-informal hour of discussion between two of my favorite people.

It looks like some dude on YouTube has done the honors of capturing the entire hour in six parts. At least he a real job of capturing the video and didn't just smack a Flip video camera in front of the TV like I've seen some people do!

Here are the obligatory links:

• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 1
• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 2
• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 3
• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 4
• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 5
• Glenn Beck & William Shatner - Part 6

I've had a Palm Treo 700p for a couple years and a Treo 650p before that, both with Sprint as a wireless carrier. The 700p acted up a few months ago, so I took it into a Sprint repair center. They promptly wiped it, upgraded the firmware and gave it back to me as "fixed." Only, it wasn't fixed. I'm not sure, but I think the firmware they upgraded me to wasn't intended to ever run on a 700p, but I'm not sure. As a result, the phone has kinda-sorta worked since then.

I've read on Engadget about a new phone exclusive to Sprint from Samsung called the Instinct. At first glance, it looks eerily similar to an Apple iPhone, but as I read more about it, it looked like it might be a good fit for me.

Boy, was I wrong.

Before I go into some specifics, let me just say that Samsung and Sprint can easily save this phone. All they need to do is open it up just a little more and listen to the "corporate" users.

What I liked

One thing I liked about the Instinct is that it does not run Windows Mobile. I've avoided Win-Mo on principle, but have helped other people with problems on Win-Mo devices and have experienced the frustration that is running Win-Mo. Using a Palm Treo vs. a Win-Mo Treo is the difference between night and day. One operates like cold tar (and has a lower video resolution) while the other is relatively stable and snappy.

The Instict is an awesome phone, it just isn't quite a "smartphone" and definitely isn't a geek's phone.

The "haptic feedback" is very cool: The phone generates a mild vibration when you touch an active icon on the touchscreen, thereby giving you physical feedback that you've activated a button or other onscreen feature. This goes a long way toward alleviating the "flatness" problem a lot of touchscreen devices have.

The Instinct has a very nice GPS navigation program that plots routes and gives you turn-by-turn directions. This is an amazing feature for a mobile handset that nets you $129 after rebate.

The sound quality of the phone is very, very good, both as a handset and as a speakerphone. Kudos to Samsung for that.

The web browser is "okay." It's better than the Blazer browser on the Treo, but it's not quite what it wants to be which is a browser that people will want to use more frequently than just when they're desperate for something off the Web.

The camera (still and video software is included) is, by far, the best cell phone camera I've ever used. Wow! It lacks a flash, but performed pretty dang well in low-light.

The Instinct has "visual voicemail" which is bound to become a de facto feature on new phones moving forward. Very cool.

Plugging the phone into a USB port on my laptop running Linux worked well. Linux detected a USB mass storage device and let me mount it. If I understand correctly, it's just acting as a card reader for the mini-SD card. This gives you access to all the non-phone media like pictures, movies, and music.

What I really didn't like

E-mail was a dealbreaker. The Samsung/Sprint e-mail client software tried to be very accomodating and provides wizards for setting up mobile e-mail accounts for popular webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and GMail, but doesn't quite deliver as more than a basic e-mail client in any other regard. It does let you set up multiple POP or IMAP accounts and supports SSL-encrypted access for privacy wheres supported. However, I don't believe it's a true IMAP client because it only displays 25 of your most recent messages (I think you can bump that up to 100 in the settings) and doesn't let you access IMAP folders other than Sent, Inbox, and Trash.

Browsing HTML e-mail messages is lame because, while the Instict does take a stab at parsing the HTML, it only displays the text and does not give you any links which you can click on to view on the phone's browser.

E-mail attachment support is nonexistent.

While I don't care, the Instinct only offers a bare minimum support for Exchange users via Outlook Web Access and doesn't sync with Exchange (or anything else, for that matter).

Speaking of synchronization, Sprint does offer a remote sync feature that let's you store your contacts and other data on a remote server. The benefit of this is that if your phone is stolen or broken, you still have access to your address book. Additionally, Sprint provides a web-based facility for you to manage your contacts.

I thought this was going to be cool. I could just export my contacts from KDE's address book and import them into Sprint's web facility and, voila, all the contacts I've had on my Treo would instantly be available to me on the Instinct.

The Sprint import facility had instructions for Outlook users to export their contacts as a CSV file and even went as far as to indicate what column names were valid and would be recognized by the import routine. I tweaked the CSV file my system generated to match the column headings Sprint wanted. The import process took several minutes and then told me it couldn't import anything. Game over.

The in-phone address book is terribly lacking. For starters, there's 's no way to store a company name with an entry, only last name or first name.

Text messaging was... okay, but cumbersome.

Typing text on the Instinct is not too bad, but has some serious caveats. While the text entry routine provides spellcheck on-the-fly, it doesn't provide spelling or grammar correction on the fly at all. That seems odd considering just about every phone I've used the last ten years or so has had that. It should at least auto-conjugate and insert apostrophes when I type "cant" or "doesnt." Nope, won't do it. Even a lone "i" surrounded by whitespace on either side remains lower case. It's smart enough to capitalize the first letter after punctuation and it will highlight mispelled words (including my un-conjugated conjunctions). Tapping on a mispelled word will offer suggestions, but this is a time-consuming affair!

I registered as a developer on Sprint's Developer website hoping to create some cool third-party apps for the Instinct -- fill in some of the gaps, but got discouraged rather quickly.

In one of the developer forum posts, a developer asks, "Is there a desktop USB SDK for access to the Calendar, Notes or any other built-in data? " A Samsung developer replied: "There is no USB SDK/API supported on the Instinct."

The Sprint sales representative who helped me purchase the Instinct told me, up front, the Instinct did not support tethering so I could not use it as a wireless modem for a laptop. I thought I'd investigate that a little further before I gave up on it -- see if it looked like it would be forthcoming as an official capability or as a third-party software add-on, but it doesn't look good.

End result?

I'll be taking the Instinct back to Sprint in the next day and will either purchase a Palm Centro instead or give their technicians another shot at fixing my 700p.

Samsung and Sprint need to assign some hardware interaction and usability people to this phone. Not only are most of the applications painfully minimalistic and basic, they're not as easy to use as they could or should be. 

Again, this could be a good smartphone for Sprint if they give more attention to the needs of "professional" users.

Get ready to be sick, twisted and freakay! Glenn Beck is coming to a "buttload" of movie theaters around the country on July 17 when his Dallas, TX live comedy stage show performance will be simulcast in HD nationwide to participating theaters.

Take it from someone who's seen Mr. Beck on stage a few times before, met him in-person, listens to radio show daily, and can't stop yakking about how Right he is... you won't want to miss this. Take your family, but make sure you invite someone who wouldn't normally go. You'll enjoy watching them pick their lower jaw up off the floor and wish they had worn Depends undergarments.

Tickets for this amazingly sick and twisted event go on sale a week from the day I'm writing this: Friday, 20 June 2008.

For more information, go here: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/11224/.

I purchased a copy of "John Adams" by David McCullough at a local grocery store a couple months ago and finally finished it this last week. The book was first released in 2001 but, since then, the HBO television network has produced an award-winning mini-series based on the book and a repackaged reissue of the book was released..

I was very intrigued by John Adams after reading about him in the Joseph Ellis history narrative "Founding Brothers." What intrigued me most was his steadfast relationship with his wife Abigail and his on-again, off-again friendship with Thomas Jefferson.

"John Adams" peels away another layer and reveals an incredible amount of detail about the man and his roles in the early years of our country.

What impressed me most in the book was how relatively "solid" Adams was in his beliefs and his philosophies. Around the time he was elected the second president of the United States, there was a great amount of fervor within those involved in politics them to rally around political parties. Adams' political philosophy probably made him more of a federalist than a republican, but he refused to affiliate with either of the predominant movements at that time. This made him both popular and unpopular with both parties, but gave him a tremendous amount of freedom as president to do what he felt was right. Reading about this demonstrated to me just how counterproductive a two-party system can be, especially for executive-branch candidates.

So much of Adams' political beliefs are needed today. He was a frugal, sensible man who didn't see politics and public service as a life of celebrity or extravagance. He never felt he was above anyone else as was demonstrated by his pitching in to help fight fires when they broke out while he was in office. It's amazing to me to imagine the president of the United States standing in a chain line passing buckets of water down so that a burning building could be extinguished. Today it would be called a "publicity event" or some such nonsense.

When I finished the last chapter of the book, which covered Adams' death and the services and recognition paid to him afterward, I couldn't help but cry for a couple of minutes. After reading the book, which contains hundreds of excerpts of letters and speeches from Adams, I felt I had made some progress toward knowing the man. While I knew from the beginning he had died almost 200 years ago, reaching that part of the book and realizing everything he had done, said, and influenced in the 89 years of his life hit me like a pile of bricks. We owe a large debt of gratitude to this man.

In related news, the HBO miniseries (which I have not seen) is coming out on DVD this Tuesday, June 10, 2008. You can get it from Amazon.com.

Listen to any kind of syndicated talk radio program and you'll usually hear about some companion website the program has. Usually, there are a handful of free things you can get on a program's website, but many of these sites have a pay-to-play members' area where the really good content is. This includes MP3 downloads of the shows, access to live audio and/or video streams, special behind-the-scenes content, forums, desktop backgrounds, etc.

The MP3 downloads are very convenient for people who don't have the luxury of sitting in front of a radio (or driving a car) for a solid three hours while a radio program is broadcast (with advertisements). It's also a boon for people who find radio advertisements annoying.

The only problem with the MP3 downloads is that theme music and produced portions of the program can not, by law, be included in the MP3 file because otherwise the MP3 would be a copyright violation.

Live streams, on the other hand, are not subject to the above described restriction because they're like a broadcast in nature. They're not a time-shift of the original program. So, if you listen to the live stream or even listen to a pre-recorded program as a stream, music and produced segments may be included.

I listen to the Glenn Beck radio program quite often. I used to download the MP3 files to listen to in the car, but it got annoying everytime Glenn and his producers would put together a segment like "Sportscasters at the 2031 animal-human hybrid baseball games", or "The History Of the Democratic Superdelegates" and I would hear Glenn say, "Listen to this... [pause] Oh man! That was great! Wasn't that great, Stu? Oh yeah! Alright! Dan? Wasn't that just the best? Yeah. Oh yeah."

I decided I needed to figure out how to save a stream.

I knew it was possible. Lots of software applications exist for any operating systems that will convert audio from a live stream into a static WAV file or similar. The open source program mplayer is one such example.

Breaking it down

First of all, I needed to figure out how the stream content made its way to my computer.

After I've logged into the Glenn Beck website as an Insider, I can click a link to listen to a stream of a particular hour of the program (or the whole program) in Windows Media format or RealAudio format. I figured I'd have better luck extracting the audio from the Windows Media format, so I went that route. Instead of just clicking the link and letting my web browser find some program that could handle the content, I saved the content to a file and then looked at the file.

The file it saved was a fairly straightforward XML file that looked something like this:

<ASX VERSION="3.0">
  <TITLE>Glenn Beck</TITLE>
  <AUTHOR>Premiere Radio Networks</AUTHOR>
  <COPYRIGHT>Copyright 2008</COPYRIGHT>

 <ENTRY>

    <TITLE>Glenn Beck 1</TITLE>

    <AUTHOR>Premiere Radio Networks</AUTHOR>

    <COPYRIGHT>Copyright 2008</COPYRIGHT>
 

    <REF HREF="mms://a0011.v67134.c6713.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/0011/6713/v08060322/glennbeck.download.akamai.com/6713/_!/shows/2008/06/03/GLENNBECKWIN20080603.WMA?auth=blahblahblahblahblah" />

    <REF HREF="http://a0011.v67134.c6713.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/0011/6713/v08060322/glennbeck.download.akamai.com/6713/_!/shows/2008/06/03/GLENNBECKWIN20080603.WMA?auth=blahblahblahblahblahblah
  </ENTRY>

  <ENTRY>

    <TITLE>Glenn Beck 2</TITLE>

    <AUTHOR>Premiere Radio Networks</AUTHOR>

    <COPYRIGHT>Copyright 2008</COPYRIGHT>

    

    <REF HREF="mms://a0011.v67134.c6713.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/0011/6713/v08060322/glennbeck.download.akamai.com/6713/_!/shows/2008/06/03/GLENNBECKWIN20080603_CLIP01.WMA?auth=blahblahblahblahblahblah" />

    <REF HREF="http://a0011.v67134.c6713.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/0011/6713/v08060322/glennbeck.download.akamai.com/6713/_!/shows/2008/06/03/GLENNBECKWIN20080603_CLIP01.WMA?auth=blahblahblahblahandblah" />

  </ENTRY>

...and so on.

This XML defines the MMS URLs for each segment of the show. There are several segments each hour. These individual MMS URLs are what I needed to feed to the application that was going to convert the audio stream to a file. In my case, I decided to use mplayer because it's just so good at everything it does!

The command line for doing the stream-to-file conversion looks like this:

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:file=dumpfile.wav \
    'mms://a0011.v67134.c6713.g.vm.akamaistream.net/blahblahblah...'

The real magic in the above command is where I use -ao pcm to tell mplayer to use the PCM file writer audio output driver (instead of sending the audio to my speakers).

This gives me a WAV file which I'll want to convert to an MP3 or Ogg-Vorbis file.

To convert a WAV file generated by the mplayer command above to an MP3 file, I use the open source lame tool:

lame -mf -q2 dumpfile.wav GlennBeck.mp3

Or, convert it to Ogg-Vorbis (the completely open and better-sounding-than-MP3 lossy audio codec):

oggenc -q2 --downmix -o GlennBeck.ogg dumpfile.wav

I've now covered the basic mechanical components of converting an audio stream into an MP3 or Ogg-Vorbis file. Next I automate it all.

Automation

Because I'm a long-time Perl junkie, I investigated how I could use a Perl script to act as the glue between the components and get the whole process of capturing a stream and converting it to MP3 or Ogg-Vorbis.

In the above walk-through, I manually logged into the Glenn Beck website with my web browser. To really completely automate this puppy, I wanted the script to log in for me. It didn't take me very long to figure out the Perl CPAN module WWW::Mechanize was what I needed to use.

WWW::Mechanize does several handy things for the programmer. It loads and parses web pages and can follow links, populate forms, and other basic kinds of interaction. It keeps track of its own cookies and session data too.

To get into the Insider area of the Glenn Beck website, members must enter their username and password on the Insider login page.

Looking at the HTML source for this page, I learned the form was named "aform", the username field was named "iUName", and the password field was named "iPassword".

I now had all the information I needed for WWW::Mechanize to log in:

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(
    cookie_jar  => {},
);
   
my $resp = $agent->get('http://www.glennbeck.com/content/insider');
   
if($resp->is_success) {
    $resp = $agent->submit_form(
        form_name   =>  'aform',
        fields      =>  {   'iUName'    =>  'myusername',
                                'iPassword' =>  'shhhhhhhh!', },
        button      =>  'submit');

Walking through the code above: First, I create the WWW::Mechanize object with an in-memory cookie jar (cookie_jar => {}). Next, I use the object to get() the log-in page. If everything works well so far, I tell the object to find the form named "aform", fill in the username and password fields, and submit the form.

One thing I realized as I was debugging my script was that after I logged in on the Insider page, I was immediately redirected to another page. In order for my script to work, it needed to follow the redirect. This was an easy fix:

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(
    cookie_jar  => {},
    redirect_ok => 1,
);

The page I got redirected to has the links on it for the streaming audio, so I'm exactly where I want to be if I want to capture and convert the latest and greatest Glenn Beck Program audio stream.

WWW::Mechanize can find links within the page with a variety of methods. One of these leverages Perl's excellent support for regular expressions. You can also search for links by the order in which they appear. The link I'm looking for looks like this:

<a href="http://www.premiereinteractive.com/cgi-bin/members.cgi?stream=shows/GLENNBECKWIN20080604&site=glennbeck&type=win_show"><img src="http://media.glennbeck.com/images/common/header_media5off.jpg" name="icon5" width="26" height="34" border="0" id="icon5" onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('icon5','','http://media.glennbeck.com/images/common/header_media5on.jpg',1)" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore()" /></a>

So, my script has the following:

$link = $agent->find_link( url_regex => qr/${datestr}.*win_show$/);
$resp = $agent->get($link);

This assumes I have a scalar variable $datestr that contains a formatted date for the show I want to capture.

Originally, I was going to use one of Perl's several XML-parsing modules to make sense of the XML in the stream link, but in the end all I needed was a regular expression to extract the mms: URLs.

my $xml = $resp->decoded_content;
my (@urls) = $xml =~ m/HREF="(mms:[^"]+)"/msg;

This gives me a list of URLs stored in @urls. Now I just need to feed them to mplayer:

$i = 1;
foreach my $u (@urls) {
    my $seq = sprintf("%02d", $i);
    my @cmd = ( 'mplayer', 
            '-vc', 'null', 
            '-vo', 'null',
            '-ao', "pcm:fast:file=${datestr}-${seq}.wav", 
            $u);
    system(@cmd);
    if ($? == -1) {
        print "failed to execute: $!\n";
    }
    elsif ($? & 127) {
        printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
        ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
    }
    else {
        printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
    }

    $i++;
}

This little ditty creates an output file for each of the segment streams. These are named something like 20080604-05.wav.

When the loop is finished, I have several WAV files sitting on the disk. Now I need to somehow sew them all together into one big WAV file so I can convert it to an MP3 or Ogg-Vorbis file. For this, I turn to sox. I decided to have the Perl script generate a shell script to run all the sox and lame commands needed.

open FH, ">/tmp/${datestr}.sh";
foreach my $j (1..($i-1)) {
    my $seq = sprintf("%02d", $j);
    print FH 'sox ', "${datestr}-${seq}.wav", " -t raw - | cat >> /tmp/${datestr}.raw", "\n";
}
print FH 'sox -w -s -c 1 -r 22050 ', "/tmp/${datestr}.raw ${datestr}.wav\n";
print FH "lame -mf -q2 ${datestr}.wav ${datestr}.mp3 ";
print FH "--tt \"Glenn Beck Show - $datestr\" ";
print FH "--ta \"Glenn Beck\" --add-id3v2\n";
close FH;

Then, I run the shell script:

system('sh', "/tmp/${datestr}.sh");

Finally, I do a little cleanup:

unlink "/tmp/${datestr}.sh", "/tmp/${datestr}.raw", map({"${datestr}-$_.wav"} (1..($i-1)));

And, I'm done. There are many other ways I could have gone about doing this, but I found a way that worked and ran with it. I'd love to hear from people who have done something similar and how they did it.

Tonight, I finished reading The Host by Stephenie Meyer, the bestselling author of the Twilight saga of young adult vampire novels. The Host is Meyer's first foray into "adult" fiction and I hope this is just a sign of many things to come. I really enjoyed this book a lot.

Why is The Host categorized as "adult" fiction? What makes it different than the other Meyer books? Well, the themes are more mature, that's for sure. The romance is amped up a couple notches, but I think any 16 year-old would be fine reading it.

A large portion of the story takes place in a complex of underground caves which I thought was a bit of a cop-out from a writing standpoint. Putting the characters into such a limited set of scenery conveniently eliminated a lot of potentially complex variables in the story. Meyer makes an effort to make up for it, though, by defining her characters with abundant detail. The dialogue between the characters was so natural to me, I often found myself laughing out loud as I read because it was so amazing to me how believable the characters were.

Could The Host turn into another series of novels for Meyer? I wouldn't complain, but I kind of hope she doesn't limit herself to it.

The basic premise of the book is that Earth has been invaded by an alien race that embeds itself into the human body as a parasite. The humans that once controlled those bodies are seemingly shut off. The story begins as a young woman named Melanie -- an "uninfected"human rebel who has been hiding from the aliens -- is captured and is implanted with a "soul" (one of the parasite aliens) named Wanderer.

Melanie isn't about to just fade away like humans are supposed to. She makes life for Wanderer challenging and... interesting, but it's Melanie's memories that form the basis for changes in Wanderer's outlook on humanity, love, and life.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way Meyer plays the alien Wanderer as a way of looking through a fresh lens at humans in various circumstances. There were multiple times, as I was reading, I was impressed by the genius of that.

It's available in hardcover wherever your favorite novels are sold.

Do you remember when you were in elementary school and you learned that plants had some mysterious process that involved a substance called chlorophyll and energy from sunlight and it made them grow? Do you remember learning that plants emit oxygen and take in carbon dioxide, which is opposite of animal life like humans (we emit carbon dioxide and take in oxygen)?

If carbon dioxide is fuel for plants, having an increase of it in the ecosystem could result in more plant growth, you might think. I'd never heard anything reported about that until a couple days ago. I was listening to Glenn Beck's radio show and was talking to a scientist named Arthur Robinson who said, yes, several studies have shown a correlation between increased carbon dioxide and increased plant growth.

In addition, the conversation between Beck and Robinson touched on the Oregon Petition, another thing I had never heard of. The Oregon Petition is a petition signed by over 30,000 scientists, 9,000 or so of which hold doctorate degrees, which says, in a nutshell, "Global warming is a myth, a fraud, a lie, etc. and should not be the basis for government policy."

Considering that all of the three frontrunning candidates for the US presidency are in favor of sweeping policy changes in the name of global warming, it would appear to be up to us, as citizens, to raise awareness of these issues. "Cap and trade" policy is nothing more than hefty taxes on businesses which do nothing but funnel money into the government. On a global scale, these policies will seriously stifle technological development in less-developed countries and could result in widespread preventable loss of life!

On Tuesday, 13 May 2008, the Fedora Project released the latest version of their Linux distribution, Fedora 9.

I was able to get my hands on Fedora 9 the previous Friday after it was discovered "in the wild" on BitTorrent networks. I promptly installed it on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop that I use every day for work.

The downside to installing a Linux distribution like Fedora before it is officially released is that you have no access to any updates. You're kind of on your own with what you've got until the official release date.

I wasn't too terribly worried about any of that. After all, Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 were, for the most part, very stable from the get-go.

I think I may have been wise to have waited. Over the last week, I've encountered all sorts of issues. Some have been related to specific hardware I'm using while others are general OS issues. A significant chunk of the issues I've run into are a direct result of my running KDE as my desktop environment. Fedora 9 includes KDE version 4 which is a ground-up rewrite of the fundamentals of KDE.

The experience has given me some flashbacks to 2003 when Red Hat Linux 9 came out with GNOME 2.2. I had been a GNOME user for a couple of years (and used AfterStep as my primary desktop environment before that) and was content with the way the Sawfish window manager worked in GNOME up until Red Hat Linux 9. Now GNOME used the Metacity window manager and I couldn't stand the thing. Where were all my configuration options? What happened to everything I had come to rely on? Well, GNOME had tucked it all away... and made everything work slower while they were at it.

I switched to KDE and found it had advanced leaps and bounds since I had looked at it last. It was mature, reliable, and, most of all, it offered plenty for me as a "configuration nut" to appreciate.

Fast forward to now. KDE4 is cool, very cool, but it's lacking a lot of stuff KDE3 had, understandably. I'm sure it's all forthcoming in due time, but I want it now!

So, below is my current list of annoyances. Some are still outstanding while others I have taken steps to resolve and have documented those steps below so that others may benefit.

Fedora 9 Annoyances

• nVidia video driver - I've got a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M tucked away in this laptop and to get 2D and 3D accelerated performance out of it, I must use the proprietary nVidia driver available for Linux. I usually get this from the fine Livna repository for Fedora. The kmod-nvidia driver was available from Livna, but it didn't work. I got it to function (details coming) but it's far from perfect.
• Tap-to-click not working on Synaptics touchpad - This is a documented bug and I'm sure Fedora will be pushing a fix soon. In the meantime Bob Kashani at Berkeley has gracefully provided a fix.
• kmix applet is missing - This one is annoying. I have grown very accustomed to having the kmix applet in my KDE taskbar. This gives me a handy mixer utility to control my sound. Without it, I'm forced to launch the kmix application every time I want to adjust the mixer. Lame.
• Font irregularities (related to NVidia?) - Application fonts between KDE and GTK/GNOME applications display differently. This has suddenly been a problem, but it isn't the first time I've seen it. I also saw it with Firefox 3 betas under Fedora 8, but only on this particular system (my laptop) and not on other systems. I blame the nVidia driver.
• Multimedia buttons - The volume up/down and mute buttons just worked out of the box with Fedora 8. With Fedora 9, KDE is completely ignorant of them.
• NetworkManager forgets everything - In Fedora 7, there was a separate KDE NetworkManager component called knetworkmanager which integrated seemlessly into KDE, but major changes within the NetworkManager community forced the Fedora project to adopt the GNOME NetworkManager work for KDE users in Fedora 8 (and Fedora 9). The problem in Fedora is that NetworkManager doesn't seem to be using the GNOME keyring system at all. Every time I connect to a secure wireless network, I have to enter the encryption key or passphrase because it isn't getting saved anywhere.
• KPilot not syncing with Palm Treo 700p via USB - This was fixed with the first Kernel update!
• KDE configuration lacks depth - This is due to the rewrite of everything, but there are things that really bug me: No configuration of the Compose key and I haven't found a way to turn off the silly "Pong" sound the system plays every time I move between virtual desktops.
• No web browser can load Zimbra admin login page - I didn't have any problems with Firefox 2, but neither Firefox 3b5 nor Konqueror can load the Zimbra admin page. Konqueror complains about a script out of control and Firefox 3b5 just sits and spins.
• gpk-application sucks - Pirut (and pup) are gone and now we have this PackageKit suite of applications for managing packages. I think it's a good idea in the long run, but gpk-application has a long way to go before it catches up with how well pirut worked. Just let me install many packages at once, why don't ya?!

Well, there's that for starters. I'll probably be blogging more in the future about these problems in more detail, including, hopefully, how to solve or work around them.

After the MiniDV videotape camcorders and before the explosion of hard disk camcorders,
several manufacturers were making these camcorders that would record directly to DVD media. A handful of them recorded to full-size DVD media, but most recorded to a small (~3 inches in diameter) mini-DVD media. One of these discs can hold about 30 minutes of SD (740x480, 30 frames per second) video or about 1.4GB of data.

A couple years ago, I was working on a video editing project and one of my sources was from one of these mini-DVD camcorders. One of the perks of the mini-DVD format is you can throw it right into a DVD player and it plays it, without much grief, like a normal DVD movie. There's even a scene-selection menu that shows you thumbnails of images to select scenes recorded on the DVD.

I think the mini-DVD format was a great idea for people who just want to videotape an event and throw it in the DVD player, but it's not so good for someone who wants to edit the video on the computer. The camcorder manufacturers probably shipped the cameras with some kind of conversion program to extract the video from the discs and convert it into an editable format, but since I didn't own one of these mini-DVD camcorders, I didn't have such software.

A little googling and I found the answer!

Check out this command:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dvd.vob

This mplayer command may be familiar to those who rip video from DVDs to convert it to an MPEG4 format or something similar.

I can't edit a VOB file, so I needed to convert the VOB into, preferably, an AVI. Most of the AVIs I edit are DV format AVIs that I get off my DV camcorders. I knew if I could get the video on the mini-DVD into that format, I'd be in heaven. I didn't find a direct way to do this, but I did find two more steps that would do it.

ffmpeg -i dvd.vob -target dv dvd.dv
cat dvd.dv | dvgrab -f dv2 -s 0 -stdin

The first command (ffmpeg) converts the VOB into raw DV data. This is data you could stream to a camcorder and store on a tape. It's not in an AVI container, but it's close. The next command (dvgrab) is usually used for capturing video from IEEE 1394 (Firewire) video devices, but being that it has an option (-stdin) for reading data from standard input, we can use it to convert our raw DV data to an AVI.

Voila!

Another book I read recently is "A Train To Potevka" written by Mike Ramsdell, a native Utahn.

Ramsdell spent many years working in Military Intelligence (MI) and with his mastery of the German and Russian languages, was involved in missions behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s.

This book, Ramsdell's first, is classified as fiction, but it's clear from reading that it is, at a minimum, based on real events. The stories take place shortly before the collapse of the Communist government in the former Soviet Union. Ramsdell was involved in a mission to capture a member of the Russian mafia for being involved in fraudulent activities surrounding the construction of the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

Just as the mission was getting close to finishing, the team's security is compromised. Ramsdell sends his two other operatives home while he "cleans up" and prepares to leave as well. He is intercepted by a mafia hit man and must find a way to escape and get out of the city to a safehouse in the town of Potevka.

This is a great book, especially for a first-time author. It ends up being both a love story and a spiritual story. For readers who are LDS, they will be especially touched by the spiritual side of the story. All readers will likely be captivated by the nitty-gritty details of Ramsdell's writing as he describes degrading conditions in the Siberian provinces of the former Soviet Union near the fall of Communism.

You can purchase this book from Amazon.com.

I've come down with a cold this last week. I took Thursday off work to try to rest and get better, but I don't think it really helped. I still feel like I've got a pool cue ball lodged at the top of my throat and it's not a very pleasant feeling.

Yesterday, this somewhat painful and uncomfortable sensation in my throat begat the beginnings of a scratchy cough and I knew (actually, my wife knew) once I tried to lay down in bed and go to sleep, that scratchy cough would become a pesky inhibitor to sleep.

Sure enough, when I tried to lay down and go to sleep last night, the itchy throat kicked in and I was overcome with a compelling need to cough.

Knowing I had to do something about this in order to sleep, I threw some clothes on and drove over to the neighborhood Smith's grocery store in search for some sugar free (because I'm diabetic) cough drops. I quickly found a couple flavors and headed in the direction of the self-checkout station. On my way, I passed their selection of books for sale and I decided to see what they had. I was pleasantly surprised to see they had Glenn Beck's book in stock. It's only been in stock one other time before that I can remember looking. After looking through the hardcover books, I decided to do a quick pass through the paperbacks to see if there was anything interesting. That's when I found "The Blue Zone" by Andrew Gross. I had heard Gross talking about his new book "A Dark Tide" on the radio and thought I might like this book.

That was between 1:30 and 2:00 in the morning.

I decided to let the cough drops work their magic for a little while before I attempted to sleep again, so I started reading "The Blue Zone." I ended up reading about 150 pages of the book before climbing back in bed (fell to sleep without any problems at all). Then, I read some more this morning, and then finished it tonight- about 22 hours after purchasing it.

I think it goes without saying that it's an easy read.

The story is also an easy one to get into. Kate Raab is the central character in the story and is a graduate student doing some kind of research in genetic biology in the New York City area. Her father is a respected and well known trader of gold and other jewelry commodities.

The story begins with Kate's father being arrested for being involved in a money laundering scheme that was connected to Colombian drug cartels, a charge he firmly denied any knowledge of.

As the government explains the evidence they have against him, they also explain they can work a deal wherein he and his family get witness protection in exchange for his testimony against other people higher up in this scheme. After much deliberation, he decides to go ahead and take the deal. While it seemed he really didn't know what his clients were actually doing with the gold he was selling to them, he knew enough about the transactions and the people involved for the government to build a strong case.

Kate is 23 years-old, about to get married, and working on groundbreaking research in her field. When offered the opportunity to flee into the witness protection program, she declines despite knowing it will be very difficult for her to maintain communication with her family once they go into the program.

Several months later, government authorities go to Kate with news that her father has disappeared and they believe he may be involved in a murder and that her life may be in danger. From here, it seems Kate's whole world gets turned upside down as she tries to figure out why her father was charged in the first place, why he's gone into "the blue zone" (a phrase used for someone in witness protection who has gone missing), and who these people are that he was allegedly involved with and testifying against.

Gross's writing style seems very contemporary and somewhat formulaic. While he does a good job of building suspense and mystery, I can't say he did it completely convincingly. There were a couple times, albeit rare, when I saw something coming that was intended to draw a big gasp of shock from the reader.

In the story, Kate is an insulin-dependent diabetic and was diagnosed just a few years prior to the events in the book. That's interesting to me because I am also a type-1 diabetic and have only been for seven years or so. Gross's handling of the diabetes was a little weak. I think he could have done his research better on the symptoms of high blood sugar and low blood sugar because I didn't buy everything he said about Kate's condition throughout the story.

Twice in the story, a character receives a surprise call on their cell phone. In each case, the character is shocked to hear the voice on the other end of the call because they assumed the call was from someone else. This bothered me because it's a cell phone! Come on! Every cell phone has Caller ID and if it wasn't whoever they thought it was, they would at least see that the number was different or that the Caller ID information was being blocked. I mean, who answers their cell phone blindly anymore and says, "Hey, honey"?!

That being said, this guy is a good storyteller. I'll probably get his next book when it goes to paperback because the premise is interesting.

If you like suspenseful thrillers where the protagonist is thrown into a situation they don't understand and they have to work against all odds to find their way out, you'll probably enjoy The Blue Zone.

I keep meaning to post some reviews of some of the books I've been reading, but it seems like I never do. So, to placate myself, I'm doing some quickie-reviews of a stack.

"An Inconvenient Book" By Glenn Beck

Oh, you were really surprised when you came across this book review, weren't you? Yeah, I'm a big Glenn Beck fan. Proof of just how nuts I am about Glenn Beck: I wrote a Perl script to convert the live streams on the Glenn Beck Insider site (which include bumper music and other types of material not fit for the "podcast" MP3s) into MP3 or Ogg files I can listen to when I want. Yeah. I'm a fan... a geeky fan.

Okay, so about this book... It is very, very good. In my opinion, this is how all conservative pundits and talk radio jocks should write their books. While a significant chunk of the book is about hot political issues like illegal immigration and global warming, there are chapters about less political topics... like going to the video store or tipping service staff. It's a pretty well-rounded capture of what goes on in the mind of the third-most listened-to talk radio host in all of America.

The layout of the book is also impressive: Every page is printed in 4-color process and the text is accompanied by charts, graphs, and humorous drawings/pictures that go along with the topic at hand. The designers also gave each page a seemingly unique watermark, or background, that gives it a well-handled, worn look- like maybe you've spilled a cup of coffee, or in the case of Glenn, a can of Coke Zero, on it, by accident.

From my perspective, as a rabid fan of Glenn's, I found the book a bit lacking in detail. That is, aside from the packaging of the book itself, there really wasn't much new here for me, content-wise, that I hadn't already read on Glenn's site, heard on his radio program, seen on his television program, or experienced myself at one of his stage shows. But... hey... I'm the exception here. If you've had some exposure to Glenn Beck or none at all, this book is an excellent way to jump in and find out what he's about.

Want to buy the book? Head over to Amazon and get it. It may be hard to find at your smaller local bookstore as it has been one of the top New York Times bestsellers since its release in November of 2007.

"The Real America" By Glenn Beck

Stop laughing, already. So, when I ordered something like six copies of "An Inconvenient Book," I went ahead and bought a copy of Glenn's previous book, "The Real America," which was written before I became turned on... uhm... exposed to Glenn (2003).

I enjoyed "The Real America" more than "An Inconvenient Book" because it's more about values and contains more personal history from Glenn about his battle to overcome alcoholism, his conversion to a member of the LDS church, meeting his now-wife Tania, and finding success in the world of talk radio.

There were parts of "The Real America" that made me put the book down and say "Wow," to myself.

A recurring topic with Glenn is "pivot points" -- significant events in a person's life at which things change. Glenn characterizes these moments as so memorable you can remember the song that was playing on the radio, or the pattern on the wallpaper in the room. This book gives you a unique insight into Glenn's personal pivot points and how he has been able to use these to make himself into a better person.

So, a little less humor and a lot more heart.

Buy it at Amazon.

"Twilight" By Stephenie Meyer

If you know anything about the Twilight series of books by Stephenie Meyer, you know they're found in the "teen, fantasy" section and they're hugely popular among teens and young adults... especially girls.

How I came to read this book is quite interesting. I was searching Amazon for books on the development environment Eclipse so I could become more proficient with it at work when I ran across a link to the book "Eclipse" by Stephenie Meyer. It is the third book in the Twilight series. I couldn't tell what it was about, exactly, but a little digging told me that Meyer was a graduate of Brigham Young University, currently lived in Phoenix, AZ, and the series was about a young girl's relationship with a vampire.

I found that interesting, but I know vampire fantasy novels are almost a dime a dozen, right? I mean, Ann Rice popularized the genre quite a bit with the goth culture over the last twenty years and then you've got the popularity of films like The Lost Boys, the Blade series, and the television shows Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. Sure, it would seem there's plenty of interest in vampires, especially for young readers.

I didn't buy any of Stephenie's books at that time. I just ordered my Java and Eclipse IDE books and went along my merry way. Then, a couple days later, I was chatting online with my friend Jennie and she asked me, point-blank, if I had read the Twilight series of books by Stephenie Meyer. No, I replied, and before I could tell her it was interesting she asked because I just recently ran across the books online, she started yelling at me (as much as a person can yell in an instant messaging session) that I HAD to read them, they were absolutely awesome, etc., etc.

Within a couple days, I had a copy of "Twilight" in my hands, compliments of Jennie. She actually wanted Christine to read the book (because Christine's a girl, you see) and included a short note inside instructing Christine to go to Stephenie Meyers' website after she finished Twilight and "read Edward's version of Chapter One, but don't do it until you've finished the book!"

Christine wasn't really that interested. So, after a week or so, I decided to take a peek and started reading the book. Within minutes, the surface of my hands became like Gorilla Glue and my face grew blinders on each side of my eyes so that I could see only the pages of Twilight and nothing else.

It's a good book. It draws you in.

The story tells of Isabel (Bella) Swan, a junior in high school who moves to the Pacific northwest to live with her father in a small rural town. While attending high school there, she meets Edward Cullen, the member of a somewhat peculiar, but beautiful family. Bella eventually learns that Edward is a vampire, as is his entire (adopted) family.

Meyers creates her own breed of vampire and picks and chooses what characteristics to borrow from popular vampire lore. Meyers' vampires have no aversion to crosses or holy water; They don't die when exposed to sunlight (but they are affected by sunlight, which is why the Cullen family has settled in a small town in an area that gets very little direct sunlight); They can't (usually) control your thoughts.

That being said, vampires in Meyers' books are very dangerous. The Cullens are a rare group that have chosen to exercise self-control over their blood lust in order to coexist with humans, but they are the exception and not the rule. Meyers' vampires are effectively immortal and have superhuman strength (and speed).

Twilight is a gripping tale of suspense, mystery, teen drama, romance, and a little horror. It's not gory, but it's not sanitized either. I wouldn't recommend the books for anyone under the age of 12.

Incidentally, a film based on the book is currently in production.

Buy your copy today at Amazon dot com!

"New Moon" By Stephenie Meyer

Once you've read Twilight, you just have to read the second book in the series, "New Moon" because you're dying to find out what happens to Bella Swan. I didn't bother waiting to get Jennie's copy of book number 2. I just went out and bought it.

"New Moon" picks up a few months after the events at the end of "Twilight." Things are going pretty well for Bella and Edward, but then Edward mysteriously leaves and tells Bella to, in short, find another boyfriend.

The bulk of the book then follows Bella as she mind-numbingly tries to cope with the loss of her loved one and begins spending time with Jacob Black, a young Native American who is more of a friend of the family than a love interest (although, he doesn't quite see it that way). Bella doesn't admit it, but she's really using Jacob to exercise new masochistic impulses she has been developing since Edward left.

Good book, but nowhere near as good as "Twilight." If that was the end of the series, I'd say don't bother reading it, but it's not the end of the series. You have to read "New Moon" to understand what happens in "Eclipse," so, it's worth it.

Buy it, where else? A-Ma-Zon!

"Eclipse" By Stephenie Meyer

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

And now, we get to "Eclipse." I bought it at a Barnes & Noble in Los Angeles because that's where I was when I finished the second book.

The third book in the series makes up for the slowness of "New Moon" and, in my opinion, rises above both of the preceding novels to be the best of the crop.

Bella Swan, constantly occupied with becoming a vampire herself so that she can have immortality (and immortal love with Edward) finds herself caught between Edward (who obviously has come back), the affection of Jacob Black, the Cullen family, the less friendly non-human-coexisting vampires, and a pack of werewolves that exist to do one thing: eradicate vampires.

Oh, and she's also trying to finish and graduate from high school.

Yeah. Lots more action in this one. And, we learn more about what these vampires can and can't do, the history of the werewolves, the excruciating process someone goes through being "transformed" into a vampire, and some great history on the Cullens.

I thought this was going to be the end of the series because of the way the book ends, but book number 4 is coming to bookstores Fall 2008.

Get "Eclipse" at Amazon.com.

A couple weeks ago, I got an e-mail message from an old friend that I went to school with from first grade until high school. She was inviting me to join a social network she had set up using the Ning platform. I signed up and have been spending a little time there catching up with the couple dozen people who have signed up as well.

This is the first time I've ever heard of Ning. I'd be interesting in hearing what some people in-the-know, as far as social networking is concerned, think of them.

In related news, if you're an alumnus of the Granger High School class of 1990 and you have not received an invitation to the class Ning site, drop me a line with your e-mail address and I'll get you invited.

Yesterday, my new laptop arrived. KnowledgeBlue purchased it for me as my HP Pavilion ZV5000Z was about three years old and was starting to show its age. KnowledgeBlue has standardized on Dell as its hardware supplier and, while I don't care for their desktop machines at all and I'm okay with their servers, I really had no clue what to think about their laptops.

What is nice about Dell is they have a line of Open Source laptops. These laptops have been certified as being friendly with open source operating systems like Linux and are available for purchase without a pre-installed operating system (the laptop does come with FreeDOS installation media).

HP also offers FreeDOS as an operating system option on many of its Business laptops for those people looking to run an open source operating system or simply avoid paying HP for a preinstalled Microsoft product.

So, anyway, I got a customized Dell Latitude D830. Here are some of the features:

• Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.40GHz
• 2GB RAM
• 120GB hard drive (w/ free fall sensor)
• DVD burner
• 9-Cell battery
• NVidia Quadro NVS 140M (256MB)
• 1920x1200 widescreen LCD panel
• Intel 3945 802.11a/g wireless

Let me just say I am impressed. So far, this laptop has been nothing but awesome. The screen is absolutely beautiful. Most impressive is the fact all the hardware seems to just work in Linux. After all the hurdles I had to jump to get my previous laptop working with Linux, this was a paradisical experience.

I did a network install of Fedora 8 after booting from a CD burned from the distribution boot.iso. The software properly configured the video card to use the open source nv driver and accurately identified the characteristics of the display panel. Sound worked fine right out of the box. I was worried about wireless networking and was prepared to install a third-party driver from a site like Livna or FreshRPMS, but when I enabled NetworkManager, it just worked! I could scan for wireless networks (it saw more than my Atheros card ever did) and connected to my home network (encrypted with WPA2) with no problems at all.

One thing I do like about my HP laptop is the ability to disable the trackpad so that when I'm using a USB mouse, I don't have to worry about brushing against the trackpad while I'm typing. Speaking of pointing devices, the D830 has taken a cue from IBM/Lenovo and provides both a trackpad and a eraser-point stick thingie with a second set of left and right buttons.

One thing that has been a bit of a concern is the sound card. Maybe I need to dig deeper, but the mixer support seems really weak. The only controllable channels I've seen in my mixer is PCM and Front. From what I've seen so far, the headphone jack is not independently controllable (it is on my HP) and I haven't seen channels for Line In or Microphone.

Battery life seems good. I haven't timed it yet, but I think I'm getting about 2-3 hours off a single charge and I haven't really tried any power saving settings. I know the Intel chipset offers a lot of options in that department.

I haven't tried any kind of suspend or sleep stuff yet. I'll have to report my findings about that in a later post.