Blog Archive: March 2018
SotD: Moana Chimes
Dear Readers, as I write this I am sitting near the blue Pacific in a place called Napili on the island of Maui. When I post this, it will be from Vancouver on the morning after this Pacific expedition. Moana Chimes is Hawaiian music, performed by Ledward Kapanaa and Bob Brozman. It swings softly and complexly and yeah, sounds like Hawaii feels. When youre in the Pacific Northwest and it gets to be March, schoolkids have a Spring Break and after six months of short grey days and long wet nights, Maui gets awfully appealing, and is one six-hour plane ride away.
SotD: Highway Star
Ah& Deep Purple, now thats what I call Maximum Rock And Roll. And Highway Star is the maximum maximum. Also, it comes with a perfect live recording. When I say Deep Purple I refer, of course, to any iteration of the band that included Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, and Ian Gillan. Did I say iteration ? Yeah, they had a lot, and some were mostly cashing in on a profitable hard-rock franchise. Fortunately, you can ignore all that crap, just buy one album and youll have all the Deep Purple anyone needs: Made In Japan. Along with Highway Star, it has masterful versions of Smoke on the Water, Lazy, Space Truckin , and especially Child In Time, which may edge the others in musical depth, but doesnt approach the raw Dionysian power of Highway Star.
Shifting Camera Choices
We just got back from a week in Maui; obviously, I took a lot of pictures. I think my choice of tools and techniques is pretty mainstream, so when I suddenly change them I wonder if Im part of a news story. As of this trip, I treat my camera (Fuji X-T1) and phone (Pixel 2) as peers, and which one I reach for depends on what kind of picture I want to take. And almost always, theres big glass on the Fuji (the Samyang 135mm F2 or Fujis own excellent 55-200 zoom). Im wondering if normal lenses on real cameras have a future.
Answering smart phones
Why couldn't I answer my phone yesterday, despite two tries? Asked on IRC, where I discovered a lot more than I expected. First, this is a Samsung GT-I9100T, so (I'm told) the user interface (for which I have found no documentation) differs from the standard Android interface: I interpret this as press on the green phone symbol in the circle and slide your finger to the right . And that's what I did. It's clear that there's a danger here, as I had already discovered: go too far and you're in the red area, so it will hang up for you.
SotD: Blue Moon
Blue Moon was written in 1934 by Rogers and Hart, and has been performed since then by more or less everyone. It makes anyone sound good, good performers sound great, and great performers melt your heart. Nobody could ever say whose version is the best, but today Im shouting out to Billie Holiday, Elvis, and the Cowboy Junkies. Billie Holiday had a naturally twisty voice and on her take applied that twist with wisdom to what is, after all, a really simple melody. This is on her very first album of original material, Billie Holiday Sings (only available on vinyl), and she covered it again, live in Europe, on Billies Blues; but the original is better.
Your account has been compromised!
While in town, Yvonne called me to tell me that she was done at the physiotherapists. Damn these smart phones! Just getting it out of my shirt pocket was bad enough, but then I couldn't answer it! Yes, I know that I need to steal swipe the icon to the right, but it didn't work. I must have made the wrong gesture. But then, maybe I was just too gentle. According to the OED, swipe can also mean to strike at with the full swing of the arms" or to deal a swinging blow or hit at . I certainly felt like it.
SotD: Pork Pie Hat
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is a Charles Mingus jazz standard, first recorded by his band in 1959, and since then performed by many others, with voice and without. The version closest to my heart is a Jeff Beck electric-guitar instrumental. [Wait, didnt you have one of those yesterday!? -Ed.] [You say that like its a bad thing. -T] The song was originally conceived of as a tribute to Lester Young, a saxophonist, recently deceased back then, who had worn one. Ive loved Mingus music since I first heard it. He always had a big band and their big showpieces always involved playing really loud and really fast; as close as jazz ever gets to head-bangin metal music.
Next NBN outage
Yvonne to me this morning: The phones aren't working . And sure enough, the NTD showed all I needed to know: The second NBN outage! So much for my guess that there would only be one. But this time the NTD status was different. Were they doing something else? Off to take a look. Yes, there were people there: What were they doing?
SotD: Ended as Lovers
The full title is Cause Weve Ended as Lovers and for almost everyone its that beautiful slow instrumental on Jeff Becks fabulous Blow by Blow album, with a dedication to Roy Buchanan, whos already contributed a Song of the Day. That was my take until I started writing this and found out it was not only written by Stevie Wonder, but was recorded on Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta, featuring his then-wife. Im mostly here to talk about Jeffs version but Stevie and Syreeta do it up very nicely too. I can remember a snarky wise-ass review of Blow by Blow, in Rolling Stone I think, where they said something like The late Sixties had way too much guitar wanking, is 1975 too soon to take up the subject again? Apparently it was fine, because it sold a million copies.
Talking Walkaway at Melbournes Wheeler Centre
The Wheeler Centre just posted the audio (MP3) of my event there with C.S. Pacat, as part of my Australia/NZ book tour. It’s a great interview, and we had a lively Q&A!
Talking Walkaway at Melbourne?s Wheeler Centre
The Wheeler Centre just posted the audio (MP3) of my event there with C.S. Pacat, as part of my Australia/NZ book tour. It’s a great interview, and we had a lively Q&A!
What does Facebook know?
Lately a number of us have been downloading our Facebook archived data, because we can. I didn't expect to find anything of interest, so I wasn't surprised that I didn't. Only the strict separation of text and images was rather annoying, since I couldn't (easily?) find out what belonged to what. And since my basic data is deliberately incorrect, it's difficult for Facebook to classify me. But then Peter Jeremy suggested that the real information is in the connections: who are my friends? Where do they live? Good question. But Facebook doesn't show much evidence of having good geographical understanding. The two Facebook groups I visit relatively frequently are M43 Tech Talk (Australia) and DEREEL OUTPOST (clearly local).
Copying DVDs, yet again
Chris Bahlo has some new horse DVDs, by Anja Beran. So I had to read them in to a computer. And once again I forgot how. I had thought that vobcopy was the way to go, but that no longer seems to work. And then there was a script called copydvd. That's still there, but it only copies one track at a time. Why is this so complicated? Still, after consulting my diary, it seems that this is the way to do it. And that worked for the first DVD, which for some reason really contained two titles. But not for the other two.
SotD: Sour Times
In the early Nineties there was suddenly this thing called Trip hop, which manifested out of another dimension and came to earth in Bristol, not otherwise famous for very much. Its distinguishing characteristic is being slow and dreamy and, I always thought, kind of sexy. Sour Times is probably the most famous Trip-hop song ever, by Portishead, along with Massive Attack the canonical trip-hopheads. When you listen to it first, you tend to just sink into the slow melody and Beth Gibbons beautiful, haunting singing. But theres a lot more happening; this one is worth listening to a few times. There are two recordings of this song; it was the big hit on their debut album Dummy, and appeared on Roseland NYC Live, in an elaborate arrangement with a big orchestra.
Where Yegges Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first of all, I should encourage people to go read these pieces and, second, point out the things that are counterfactual. The posts Now at Medium (sigh, it makes me sad when another indie blogger migrates off their own platform): why I left Google and Who will steal Android from Google?
Looking back at 10 years of compartmentalization at AWS
At AWS, we don't mark many anniversaries. But every year when March 14th comes around, it's a good reminder that Amazon S3 originally launched on Pi Day, March 14, 2006. The Amazon S3 team still celebrate with homemade pies! March 26, 2008 doesn't have any delicious desserts associated with it, but that's the day when we launched Availability Zones for Amazon EC2. A concept that has changed infrastructure architecture is now at the core of both AWS and customer reliability and operations. Powering the virtual instances and other resources that make up the AWS Cloud are real physical data centers with AWS servers in them.
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 07
Here’s part seven of my reading (MP3) (part six, part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a... more
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 07
Here’s part seven of my reading (MP3) (part six, part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a... more
Looking back at 10 years of compartmentalization at AWS
At AWS, we don't mark many anniversaries. But every year when March 14th comes around, it's a good reminder that Amazon S3 originally launched on Pi Day, March 14, 2006. The Amazon S3 team still celebrate with homemade pies! March 26, 2008 doesn't have any delicious desserts associated with it, but that's the day when we launched Availability Zones for Amazon EC2.
SotD: At the 100th Meridan
Almost every Canadians list of Songs-of-the-Day is going to include a Tragically Hip number or two, and Im no exception. They had a lot of great tunes and this one is right up there. Cant write this without getting kind of damp, because we lost Gord yesterday it feels like. If youre not Canadian and have no idea who The Hip are or who Gord was, listen to this anyhow and if you like rock music youll probably like it a lot. Gord Downie and Rob Baker in 1989. For non-Canadians heres the tl;dr: The Hip were a guitar-rock band with strong songwriting, a charismatic singer in Gord Downie, and a fabulous sound based on Downies voice cutting through Rob Bakers wall of harmonious electric-guitar thunder.
TIFF, not JPEG
Today was Saturday, the day for my weekly house photos. I had a little time, so I finally started on something I have been planning for a long time: make all the intermediate images in (16 bit) TIFF, not JPEG. That promises better quality, but required considerable attention to my scripts. One of the biggest headaches is the plethora of extensions . In various scripts I currently have: EXTENSIONS="_DxO.tif _DxO.tiff _DxO.jpg .jpeg .jpg .JPEG .JPG .gif .GIF .png .PNG .tiff .tif" And that's not including raw formats, which are even more poorly defined.
SotD: A Love Supreme
Im talking two tracks today, named Acknowledgment and Resolution, but there are millions of people who love them but dont know their names. They are the A Side of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, recorded in 1964 and one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. Thing is, most people just start at the beginning of the album and stick with it till the end. Or if youre a traditionalist like me, the LP. Either way everyone just thinks of it as A Love Supreme. Its a hell of a piece of music. Since this is modern jazz, the harmonies arent classical, but you stop noticing after a few seconds, because John is taking you on a trip and he knows where hes going and its hard to resist his pull.
More Facebook fallout
Seen on The Shovel today: Wishing him a happy birthday for last week and complimenting him on the new shirt he bought today, Mark Zuckerburg reassured 26 year-old, university educated, soccer-playing junior accountant James Samuel Jimmy Wilson, that Facebook only collects the basic data required to run his account... ACM only downloads articles once.
More nvidia pain
Yesterday I built a new system for teevee, the TV display computer. But when I tried to start X, I got a failure message that printed only on the display, and not in the log files. The system log had nothing, and /var/log/Xorg.0.log had only: [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0. Please [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): check your system's kernel log for additional error [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): messages and refer to Chapter 8: Common Problems in the [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): README for additional information.
SotD: Appassionata
Formally, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, by Ludwig van Beethoven. The name Appassionata was attached not by Ludwig but by a music publisher ten years after his death. But its stuck because well, the music is really passionate; soft and intimate then loud and fast. Its usually the highlight of any concert where its performed. I heard someone say on the radio once, about Beethoven: Maybe not the best melodist or orchestrator to have ever composed, but unique in creating the feeling that each successive note is absolutely the only one that could possibly have been chosen. This is like that.
Banks: beware of scams
Two messages in mail today, one from each of my banks. The one from the Bank of Melbourne read: Subject: Security Alert - Important Phone Scam Information Bank of Melbourne will never send you an email asking for your personal details or link to a sign-in page. Keep your system security up to date. For more information visit bankofmelbourne.com.au/hoaxemails View this email with images At Bank of Melbourne, helping our customers avoid falling victim to scams is our top priority.
SotD: Barton Hollow
The Civil Wars were on every radio for while there around 2010, and I liked it when they were; a refreshing break from electric noise (hey, I like electric noise, but still) and especially from synthetically-constructed pop sugar-candy. Barton Hollow is definitely my fave track, and I cant imagine anyone not liking it. I have Barton Hollow the album, and its mostly very good. Interestingly, the title track has a noticeably different sound; a little grittier, a little less pure, a little friction in the arrangement. I initially thought that the production quality wasnt up to the standards of the rest of the record.
Facebook stole my personal data!
The big news at the moment is that Facebook has been caught giving user data to Cambridge Analytica. People are up in arms. Did they steal my data too? No, probably not, at least not in this case. As one commentator notes, Cambridge Analytica could just be the tip of the iceberg, so maybe others have. Am I worried about my personal data? No. I never did trust Facebook, so I'm not disappointed. most of my profile information on Facebook is incorrect. Place of birth (currently Kandahar), place of residence (currently Aleppo), education (started at the University of Melbourne in 1952; this part is true, but it was a kindergarten).
SotD: The Man Who Sold The World
This is a David Bowie song that I gather was mostly forgotten Id certainly never heard it until it popped up on Nirvanas MTV Unplugged In New York. This was in 1993, after which Bowie apparently added it to his regular live set; which is cool. The whole Unplugged set is great; it doesnt have any Nirvana chestnuts, just obscure numbers and covers. My second-favorite song on it is Plateau, for which a few Meat Puppets joined the band and has the immortal lyric You see a lot up there but dont be scared / Who needs action when you got words.
SotD: Thats Right!
This is a cheery bright fast polyrhythmic acoustic guitar instrumental by Jesse Cook. Like a few other numbers here at Song of the Day, I discovered this one by killing time in a record store; mind you, this was HMV in its declining days, not one of the cool-magnets of yore. But I loved the tune and asked the clerk and bought the record. The record is called Vertigo and all of it is at least listenable and at best memorable; Id call Thats Right! the highlight. It also has Sade guesting very prettily on a couple of numbers. On the YouTube linked below, Jesse intros the song and explains that it combines Bo Diddley and Bhangra rhythms with Zydeco accordion (played on Vertigo by Buckwheat Zydeco himself).
SotD: Persephone
My favorite living jazz musician, and sometimes my favorite living musician, is Patricia Barber, a Chicagoan songwriter, singer, piano player, and bandleader. Shes really good at all four of those things, and an evening with her band is one of the most intense musical experiences you can track down at this point in the twenty-first century. Modern jazzbos dont have greatest hits as such, but if they did, Persephone would probably be hers. Disclosure: Heres how deranged a fan I am. Once a year or so, I spend some surplus airline points and sneak off for a Monday evening in Chicago, where Ms Barber plays at The Green Mill (once Al Capones favorite bar) and you can go see her for some absurdly small amount of money; the crowd consists of about half locals and half devotees from around the world; Ive sat next to people from Taiwan and ...
Infinitely scalable machine learning with Amazon SageMaker
In machine learning, more is usually more. For example, training on more data means more accurate models. At AWS, we continue to strive to enable builders to build cutting-edge technologies faster in a secure, reliable, and scalable fashion. Machine learning is one such transformational technology that is top of mind not only for CIOs and CEOs, but also developers and data scientists. Last re:Invent, to make the problem of authoring, training, and hosting ML models easier, faster, and more reliable, we launched Amazon SageMaker. Now, thousands of customers are trying Amazon SageMaker and building ML models on top of their data lakes in AWS.
Infinitely scalable machine learning with Amazon SageMaker
In machine learning, more is usually more. For example, training on more data means more accurate models. At AWS, we continue to strive to enable builders to build cutting-edge technologies faster in a secure, reliable, and scalable fashion. Machine learning is one such transformational technology that is top of mind not only for CIOs and CEOs, but also developers and data scientists.
SotD: I Put A Spell On You
This song was written in 1956 by Screamin Jay Hawkins as a ballad, but he claims the producer got him drunk in the studio and thats when he started Screamin, and people loved it, so he never stopped. Since then, its been recorded a whole lot. Im here to recommend a mini video festivals worth of takes, and one recording, and this may be a little weird but I think its the best out there, by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I actually think the Jay Hawkins story is a little sad. He was a good songwriter with a huge, thunderous voice, and after this song he turned his stage act into a sort of slapstick voodoo-shaman sideshow.
How To Stop Kinder Morgan
Yesterday, I was arrested and charged with Civil Contempt for failing to respect an injunction forbidding protesters from coming within 5 meters of the property where Kinder Morgan is trying to bring a pipeline for tar-sands bitumen to the Pacific. Herewith a few words on why this kind of action might work and how to go about doing it. Well, and I guess I should tack on a note about why the pipeline is a stupid idea and should be stopped, but I suspect most readers here are already on-board with that. But before any of that, my strongest thanks to our gracious hosts, the good people of the Coast Salish, whose unceded territory we were on.
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 06 [FIXED]
Here’s part six of my reading (MP3) (part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation... more
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 06 [FIXED]
Here’s part six of my reading (MP3) (part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation... more
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 05 [FIXED]
Here’s part five of my reading (MP3) (part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and... more
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 05 [FIXED]
Here’s part five of my reading (MP3) (part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and... more
SotD: Spanish Pipedream
John Prine, now theres an original. Hes an ordinary guy with a beat-up face and a beat-up voice, and his songs get played by folkies and rockers in bars and basements across America. Not outside it though I bet, he is just so American, and I mean that in the best possible way. Spanish Pipedream is a cheerful little uptempo number thatll make you smile. Its from a long time ago but the sentiment is fresh: Blow up your TV / throw away the papers / move to the country / build yourself a home. I stage-managed a John Prine concert sometime in the Seventies my beer and rent money at college and Id call it in the top five concerts Ive seen in my life, and Ive seen a lot.
Goodbye Gmail
After 24 hours of routing my FreeBSD mail to Gmail, it seems that Peter Jeremy's assumption is correct: Gmail is rejecting mail specifically because it has been forwarded from mail.lemis.com, and thus fails the SPF test. Other mail continued to be filtered. That, combined with Gmail's clumsy mail selection method (click on the tiny box next to Every Message), makes it impractical. That's a pity, especially since there seems to be no way to tell Gmail's spam checker to ignore that kind of problem, or, better, to accept it if it comes from mail.lemis.com. So for the time being at any rate, it's goodbye Gmail.
Another multimedia content site
Mail from Carsten Holtkamp today, suggesting: I had a look on your diary entry: Dealing with online multimedia. So, I think the reason for the 30 days rule is, that the content is only available for that time due to legal restrictions. That's a reasonable assumption, but it's not the case. There's lots of older stuff there, like the example I discussed yesterday, which is 3 months old and has a specified expiry date of 31 December 2018.
SotD: The Dry Cleaner
I already blogged about The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, by Joni Mitchell and Charles Mingus, eleven years ago, so if you want a deep-dive on the music and context, go read that. Today, just listen to it, and if it doesnt get you smiling and bopping, theres nothing I can say that will help you. Ill keep it brief: Shadows and Light is a fabulous live album. The band: Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Don Alias, Jaco Pastorius (!) , and Michael Brecker. That is a jaw-dropping list of names. The song? Its fast, its funny, and its a great tune.
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 06
Here’s part six of my reading (MP3) (part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation... more
More Internet effects
Part of shopping involved getting some cash from an ATM. Since ANZ closed their ATM in Sebastopol a month ago, that has become a problem. Since I was in town, I went to Bridge Mall, noting quite a queue in front of me. Summary: wait time 2 minutes, transaction time (including everything) about a minute. On down Bridge Mall, noting the lack of people and the number of premises for lease: OK, it was mid-morning on a Thursday.
NBN outage, day 2
No NBN outage yesterday, as expected, and when I came into the office, the network was still up, confirming my theory that nothing would happen this month. That was a little premature, unfortunately. At 7:38 we went off the net, and it didn't come back until 15:10, almost exactly 7½ hours. On the way into town, and also on the way back, I drove past the radiation tower to see what they were doing, but there was nothing obvious. After the net came back, there was no obvious improvement. In fact, there was quite a bit of congestion for several hours, after which things came back to normal.
SotD: Downpressor Man
In the earliest days, The Wailers were Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, and Peter Tosh. Peter was the guy in the band who was a foot taller than everyone else; also the only one who could play any instruments. A huge guy with a huge voice, his songs never in a hurry, and there are a few that people will be listening to centuries from now. For instance, Downpressor Man. This is from Equal Rights, a really remarkable recording that includes chestnuts like Get Up, Stand Up and Stepping Razor. Its just a big warm slow bath end-to-end; the words and politics are cutting but the sound is gentle and cradling.
Hugo nominations close tomorrow!
If you attended either of the past two World Science Fiction Conventions or are registered for the next one in San Jose, California, you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which you can do here — you’ve only got until midnight tomorrow! The 2017 Locus Recommended Reading List is a great place to start... more
Gmail false positives
I've been using Gmail for spam filtering for over 2½ years: first I receive the mail via one of my 450-odd email addresses, then send it on to Gmail for spam filtering. On the whole it works relatively well, though the filter is definitely a bit on the aggressive side: there are many more false positives than false negatives. But in the last couple of days things have changed significantly. Today I ended up with 174 messages in my spam folder. Of these 28 were genuine spam, 115 were FreeBSD commit messages, and there were 31 others.
SotD: Barretts Privateers
I suspect every Canadian of a certain age has heard this, probably on CBC or maybe sitting up late of a hazy evening. Its a sad boisterous story of ruin at sea, mens music written for mens voices, and youll never forget it once youve heard it even once. While Barretts Privateers initially sounds like an old folk tune, its nothing like that; it was written in 1976 by Stan Rogers, whose music I loved, and it really hurt when he died at age 33, yet another touring musician who went down with an airplane. Its got some bars in 5/4 time, hardly a folk standard, and its sort of historically bogus.
NBN public relations
While writing my article on the National Broadband Network outage, I went to their home page. How about that, they're listening to their customers: That links to another page with planned obsolescence: it refers to February , without a year. It explains the three key areas that they find important: Progress Were rolling it out, with more than 6.3 million premises able to connect today.
PCs for septuagenarians
I'm gradually heading towards my 70th birthday, and a statistic from Statista brought that home: Desktop computers are for septuagenarians! Why is that? Unable to change with the times? No, I think that the real answer is that I don't have to change with the times. I've been using mobile phones since 1990, long before most people I know: in fact, I was known at Tandem as that guy with the cellphone . But I had a good reason then: I was moving around a bit, and people had difficulty contacting me.
Finding online TV content
In the previous article I glossed over how to find online TV content. That's not always simple. We had watched the first episode of Die Kirche bleibt im Dorf , and decided to download further episodes. OK, off to the ARD Mediathek, which has a search function: Sorted by relevance, the top hit is Kundin bleibt Kunde ( Customer (feminine) remains customer (masculine) , a legal decision about German grammar). What earthly connection does that have? A couple of false positives could be acceptable, but nothing this far off the mark, especially since the thing I was looking up didn't show up at all.
Dealing with online multimedia
I've been fighting multimedia software and data for over 13 years, and somehow it's not getting much easier. Now I can get material online, and I've been able to turn off my TV broadcast reception, but the software and the suppliers still cause problems. The big plus I found some months back is that nearly all German public broadcast TV programmes are available online, notably at the ARD Mediathek and the ZDF. I'm still hoping to find something similar in English. But how do I find the content? There's MediathekView, but for some reason it limits itself to a maximum age of 30 days, and even then it doesn't find everything.
SotD: Gimme Sympathy
I think Im probably a big Metric fan even though Ive never actually sent any money their way, because whenever a song comes on the radio I find myself humming and smiling. Especially Gimme Sympathy. This is from Fantasies, released in 2009, which sure got a lot of radio play up here in Canada. Emily Haines has a fine, sweet, penetrating, voice, and major songwriting chops. Metric cuts right through the factory-produced schlock that mostly fills rock radio (and by the way always has, its just we forget the schlock of previous decades). I havent seen them play, but during the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver, there was a weird but excellent concert in which a bunch of musicians not including Neil Young but including Lou Reed and Elvis Costello put on an evening of Neil Young songs.
Preparing for the Big Outage
Tomorrow is claimed to be the first of six total Internet outages announced by the Australian National Broadband Network for the next 3 weeks. Can I believe that? Asked a question on the DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook group and discovered a number of things: Most people hadn't been informed at all, including Telstra customers. Some had been given different times. Part of the different times seems to be that I didn't receive some of the messages. One of the people quoted messages from Aussie Broadband that I hadn't seen.
Comparing computer products
Another borderline spam message today today: I noticed your website sends users to Privoxy here on this page - http://lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2008.php. I wanted to warn you that they're sending their visitors to a couple of shady sites, like a binary options review website which promotes known investment scams (take a look at the bottom of each page). I'm sure you don't want your visitors getting scammed - if you're looking for an alternative, may I suggest our list of free VPNs as an alternative? http://ctech.link/free-vpn. In case you???re unaware, a VPN is another type of proxy that achieves the same end result as Privoxy.
Did Craig Weber (klearview) defraud you?
One of my most irritating experiences with eBay recently was in regard to seller klearview_au, otherwise known as Craig Weber, who took my money, opened a non-payment case, causing me to pay again, and never delivered the item. Both eBay and the police saw no reason to intervene: too much trouble. I'm not the only one. Although it seems difficult to find, two others have found my diary entries and contacted me. I sent a message to the police, and got no reply. How many people do we need to get something done? And how do they find out about the rest of us?
SotD: K.515
I believe its official name is Mozarts String Quintet No. 3 in C, but saying K then a number tells everyone that its by Mozart, and since he wrote like fifty instances of every known form of classical music, its easier to just remember your favorite K-numbers. 515 is right up there among mine; strong Mozart, which is all you need to know. By the way, if youre wondering about those K-numbers, Wikipedias Köchel catalogue article has you covered. The thing is that since Mozart was usually broke and trying to convince three different wealthy patrons that he was their exclusive guy, he wrote music like a crazed gerbil on steroids and didnt keep much in the way of records, so trying to organize his oeuvre has been the work of several other peoples lifetimes.
Unlocking Enterprise systems using voice
At Amazon, we are heavily invested in machine learning (ML), and are developing new tools to help developers quickly and easily build, train, and deploy ML models. The power of ML is in its ability to unlock a new set of capabilities that create value for consumers and businesses. A great example of this is the way we are using ML to deal with one of the world's biggest and most tangled datasets: human speech. Voice-driven conversation has always been the most natural way for us to communicate. Conversations are personal and they convey context, which helps us to understand each other.
Will ML training drive massive growth in networking?
This originally came up in an earlier blog comment but it’s an interesting question and one not necessarily one restricted to the changes driven by deep learning training and other often GPU-hosted workloads. This trend has been underway for a long time and is more obvious when looking at networking which was your example as...
Will ML training drive massive growth in networking?
This originally came up in an earlier blog comment but it’s an interesting question and one not necessarily one restricted to the changes driven by deep learning training and other often GPU-hosted workloads. This trend has been underway for a long time and is more obvious when looking at networking which was your example as...
Unlocking Enterprise systems using voice
At Amazon, we are heavily invested in machine learning (ML), and are developing new tools to help developers quickly and easily build, train, and deploy ML models. The power of ML is in its ability to unlock a new set of capabilities that create value for consumers and businesses. A great example of this is the way we are using ML to deal with one of the world's biggest and most tangled datasets: human speech.
NBN: How fast?
Mail from MyNetFone today, pointing to this page, explaining Internet link speeds with the National Broadband Network. Isn't that simple? 12/1, 25/5, 50/20, 100/40, in each case Mb/s down and up. But no, those are old, worn-out specifications. No silly confusing numbers any more, only Plans : Basic, Standard, Standard Plus and Premium. And their speeds are very different. At peak the downlink speeds are 7, 15, 30 and 60 Mb/s. That's round 60% of the old values. That's not what the NBN promised. Is this just an indication that you shouldn't sign up with MyNetFone, or is the industry diluting its promise?
Has my password been stolen?
One of the things I'm very careful about is not to share passwords across various Internet services. In particular, I never log in using a Facebook or Google password, and I use different IDs (including email addresses and password) for each service. So I was rather interested to read this article, which pointed me to https://haveibeenpwned.com/. OK, let's check. Yes, indeed, I have had my password stolen! Really? Tried again with my standard fake email, [email protected], the one I only use in examples in this diary. Bingo! It too has been exploited: Problem.
SotD: After Midnight
After midnight, its gonna be peaches and cream& mmmmm. This, originally by J.J. Cale, is one of the Twentieth Centurys sweetest little electric-music outings, gentle, sexy, and fast. Now, J.J. made a whole lot of money on this song when Eric Clapton decided to put it on a couple of albums and play it at a whole lot of concerts, and both versions are worth hearing. I saw J.J. play once stage-managed the show, in fact had to convince him to play an encore. Ive seen Clapton several times and while he might not the greatest guitarist to have ever lived, he never plays a song the same way twice.
SotD: Atomic
Oh& your hair is beautiful well, that lyric divides people. Ive read high-falutin rock critics slam its superficiality, embedded in a track that hardly has words anyhow, and certainly none that make sense. But you know, every time she sings that phrase, I melt. And love the whole song. Back in the day when the band had hits on the radio I liked every one of them, and when they didnt any more, I bought The Best of Blondie and man, Im not sure theres ever been a pop recording with more end-to-end concentrated excellence. I noticed when my kids were young, Id put it on and every time, theyd both start dancing right away.
Camera USB problems cornered
I have continued to have intermittent but frequent problems reading photos in from my Olympus OM-D E-M1, but not with the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. Lately I've had exactly the same syndrome with the E-PM1, which at least suggests that the problem isn't in the camera. The E-M1 (Mark I) and the E-PM1 use Olympus' old-style USB 2.1 cable, while the E-M1 Mark II uses a USB 3.0 type C cable. Could it be related to the connection? On a whim, changed the cable to a different USB hub. Bingo! The problem no longer occurs (after only one or two attempts).
SotD: Phase Dance
So back in the Seventies, if you were a college student and it was summer, youd sit around smoking weed and then someone would say Lets go to the record store. And in those days the people who worked there knew all the coolest music. So in the middle of the head-banger era, youd float into the record store and thered a fast brilliant jazz-guitar instrumental, and youd suddenly find youd become a fan of Pat Metheny. Phase Dance was that song on that summer day, from his debut Pat Metheny Group. Its not his masterpiece (more on that later) but its a fast bright shiny cheery piece of music with a nice bass-line and it moves right along and is never boring.
Remove that link!
Received a strange email today: Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2018 20:51:50 +0000 (UTC) From: EAG Marketing <[email protected]> Subject: Link Removal Request Message-ID: <1702181020.31743.1520455910533@ip-10-1-0-82.ec2.internal> Reply-To: EAG Marketing <[email protected]> [-- Type: multipart/alternative, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 2.3K --] Hello, I am writing on behalf of the Hertz Corporation. I work for EAG , which is one of Hertz digital agency partners. I???m working on cleaning up links to www.hertz.com, and I need your help in removing some links from your site. While we appreciate the support, at this time we are requesting that you please remove this links as we strive to better control our backlink profile.nk profile better.
NBN: Some uptime possible
I've commented frequently in the past that the Australian National Broadband Network is not the most reliable. But it seems that I ain't seen nothing yet. Over the last couple of weeks I have received the following mail: We have received the following advice from nbn: ---- This notification is to let you know that we will be performing Fixed Wireless network capacity work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 30 hrs 0 mins during the change window NBN estimates interruption 1 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 14th Mar 7:00AM End: 14th Mar 9:00PM NBN estimates interruption 2 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 15th Mar 7:00AM End: 15th Mar 9:00PM NBN estimates interruption 3 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 17th Mar 7:00AM End: 17th Mar 9:00PM ---- ...
SotD: Love Me Like a Man
This was composed by Chris Smither (no, Id never heard of him either) but was a hit for, and is now sort of a trademark of, Bonnie Raitt. Bonnies recorded a lot of good music over the years, but the thing with her is you need to see her play live, its at another level entirely. Bonnie is a tuneful, convincing, loud blues singer (listen to Love Me Like a Man, for example), and is also a dazzling guitarist. In particular she has this gritty, textured slide-guitar tone that absolutely nobody else gets. This was brought home to me one time when I was at a concert and the opening act was led by her bands keyboard player, and they werent bad at all, funk and soul and energy.
Classroom materials for Little Brother from Mary Kraus
Mary Kraus — who created a key to page-numbers in the Little Brother audiobook for students with reading disabilities — continues to create great classroom materials for Little Brother: Who’s Who in “Little Brother” is a Quizlet that teaches about the famous people mentioned in the book, from Alan Turing to Rosa Luxembourg; while the... more
SotD: Riding On The Rocket
Ive probably seen Shonen Knife (Wikipedia if you dont read Japanese) more than any other currently-performing rock band. When they get on stage you can count on a couple of hours of pure high-energy high-melody high-rhythm hard-rockin fun, and you just cant have too much of that. Riding the Rocket is just one of a couple of dozen totally great as-good-as-Rock-gets tunes. Naoko Just the facts: Shonen Knife were originally three young Japanese women from Osaka, two of them sisters. Theyve switched instruments and members and have, over the years, become a rotating planetary system around Naoko Yamano, who provides lead guitar and vocals and a lot of songwriting.
Hey, Wellington! Im headed your way!
I’ve just finished a wonderful time at the Adelaide Festival and now I’m headed to the last stop on the Australia/New Zealand tour for Walkaway: Wellington! I’m doing a pair of events at Writers & Readers Week at the New Zealand Festival; followed by a special one-day NetHui on copyright and then a luncheon seminar... more
SotD: Ashes to Ashes
Its hard to pick a Bowie because, obviously, there were so many Bowies. One time my son and I, he then fifteen or so, were driving somewhere, and he asked me Dad, whos David Bowie? and I said A musician who& then I was stuck. For me, there are really two big Bowie songs, Heroes and Ashes to Ashes, and while the former has more emotion, I think Ashes has more musical depth. Oh, yes, and This Is Not America, but thats a niche taste. I believe the full title is Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). I remember my then-wife bringing home Scary Monsters; at the time I was in a jazz&blues phase and would never have bought a Bowie record, deeming him too synthetic.
How to be better at being pissed off at Big Tech
My latest Locus column, “Lets Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech,” looks at how science fiction can make us better critics of technology by imagining how tech could be used in difference social and economic contexts than the one we live in today. The “pro-tech” side’s argument is some variation on, “You can’t get... more
Internet banking , not our problem
I needed to do a bank transfer this morning, from the Bank of Melbourne this morning, using their Internet Banking service. But this time logon failed in a number of different ways. To log in you need three parameters: an access number, a Security number , effectively a PIN between 4 and 6 characters long, and an Internet Password , where the word Internet is doubly superfluous. But when I tried to log in, I got a transient error messages against the Security number : Please match the requested format . The value is numeric, of course, and this looks like the page's way of saying You entered a non-numeric character .
SotD: Brothers in Arms
Dire Straits records have always been notably good-sounding, and Brothers in Arms became the occasion for the purchase of a brand-new CD player back in the day for many music geeks I was one of them. The title song sounds good too, but today were acknowledging its beauty and sadness and message. The beauty, superficially, is in the exquisite guitar obbligatos that come in after each sad verse. But theres more; while nobody would call Mark Knopfler one of the great singers, he really gives it all hes got on Brothers, suggesting notes that are way out of his reach, and just the right amounts of room in between, here and there.
Next HDR software
My experience with Aurora HDR was mixed: it was much better than HDR Express, but still left a number of questions unanswered. Before looking in more detail, it seemed worthwhile to look at the alternatives, notably the top of the list that I had found. In passing, it's interesting to note that I received no reply from Macphun about my findings. I would have expected some kind of reply, though clearly they would not have agreed with me. That's Photomatix PRO, and to my surprise I discovered that I had had contact with it before, nearly 9 years ago.
Olympus firmware: worth the trouble?
Taking the photos of the flowers brought a surprise: they were stored in LN format, which in Olympus speak means full sized JPEG, average quality , round 3 MB in size. This was with the OM-D E-M1, where all the settings got reset. Spent something like 30 minutes putting them in again, with the exception of one that I forgot to write down and can't find: instead of the Super Control Panel , display a single menu item at once. Is it worth upgrading the firmware? The purpose of this particular upgrade was: Corrected issue of autofocus (AF) function not operating correctly when using the "LEICA DG ELMARIT 200mm F2.8 [sic] / POWER O.I.S.
Refund: done!
Last week I cancelled a purchase of a lens cap, because it didn't fit. The seller responded quickly with a refund and the indirect recognition that the cap was faulty: he didn't want it back. That was confusing, though: I got a message saying that the purchase price had been refunded: Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 23:21:34 -0700 From: eBay <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Seller initiated a refund: Leica Plastic Lens Cap Press Tabs apx 46mm just under 2&quot; Superb But that was just the purchase price, not the postage.
SotD: Am I Blue?
Well, since yesterday I reached all the way back to the Nineteen Twenties for a show tune that went through many hands including Willie Nelsons, lets do it again today! Am I Blue was written by those big stars Harry Akst and Grant Clarke (Who? A couple of Tin Pan Alley types) in 1929 for the screen, and Wikipedia says its made it onto 42 different screens. Its a cool tune and up to the Song of the Day standard, but mostly here because I was charmed by video. The most famous, of course, would be the songs debut in On With the Show!, which reading about introduced me to the notion of Pre-Code movies; if the notion is new to you too, follow that link.
MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB 10.2.13
Its hard to believe that a relational database in personal use at home will ever have much of a load when it comes to transaction processing but our home RDBMS is surprisingly busy, with more than a hundred database interactions per second. Its still not even within an order of magnitude as busy as many...
MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB 10.2.13
Its hard to believe that a relational database in personal use at home will ever have much of a load when it comes to transaction processing but our home RDBMS is surprisingly busy, with more than a hundred database interactions per second. Its still not even within an order of magnitude as busy as many...
SotD: Blue Skies
From waaaay back in 1926, this one. What happened was, I wanted the series to drop by Willie Nelson, and my fave Willie album is Stardust, and song on it is Blue Skies. That whole album is salve for the wounded soul I think, and Blue Skies maybe the sweetest and strongest. But, boy, does this one ever have a history. Typing Blue Skies live into YouTube gets you into some surprising territory. Just so you dont have to, I listened to versions by Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Al Jolson, Earl Hines, and Ella Fitzgerald. I think the clear winners on musical merit are Ella and Willie.
E-M1 Mark II Firmware 2.0
After fighting my way through the firmware update for my Olympus equipment, I finally have not only new features, but also a new manual . So what's new? The list is here, but most of it is uninteresting. The things that interest me are: Smaller AF points. This could be of use most of the time, but I'll have to play with them. Focus stacking (Olympus terminology for in-camera focus stacking) now supports the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO.
Updating Olympus firmware
Olympus has released firmware upgrades for several products that I have: the OM-D E-M1 Mark I, the OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO. The pre-release discussion suggests a way to download the firmware and install it from an SD card, just what I have been looking at for a long time. The information was posted on Facebook, so I can no longer find it, but it seems to be related to this page. It let me download the code (88 MB!) , but it's structured so that I can't find out how to do the transfer to the SD card.
A key to page-numbers in the Little Brother audiobook
Mary Kraus teaches my novel Little Brother to health science interns learning about cybersecurity; to help a student who has a print disability, Mary created a key that maps the MP3 files in the audiobook to the Tor paperback edition. She was kind enough to make her doc public to help other people move easily... more
Im coming to the Adelaide Festival this weekend (and then to Wellington, NZ!)
I’m on the last two cities in my Australia/NZ tour for my novel Walkaway: today, I’m flying to Adelaide for the Adelaide Festival, where I’m appearing in several program items: Breakfast with Papers on Sunday at 8AM; a book signing on Monday at 10AM in Dymocks at Rundle Mall; “Dust Devils,” a panel followed by... more
SotD: Im a Man!
Wait& you say, thats two Steve Winwood songs in a row! Indeed. Only, this one is shorter and hotter. And anyhow, its a Spencer Davis Group song, so there. You have to feel a little sorry for Spencer, hell always be known as The Guy Who Had Steve In His Band. So, the world owes him one. This is the most primitive major-progression rave-up imaginable, which shouldnt be surprising since Winwood was still a teenager; he was 14 when the Davis band launched. And the lyrics, well, dont go there: Well, if I had my choice of matter I would rather be with cats / All engrossed in mental chatter showin where our minds are at is a high point.
Free as in free beer?
Where do I find maps that I can embed on my pages without worrying about copyright? Google Maps allows embedding, and OpenStreetMap exists for that purpose, but neither of them do atlas-style maps. So I went looking and found this page, which looked like it could do exactly what I'm looking for: But it only showed a small fraction of the maps, unsorted. How should I sort them? Nothing useful. And why sort by price ? In the end, I didn't find just what I was looking for (a world map centered on Asia and Australia).
SotD: The Low Spark
The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys was the album and the song, and its a song thatll never die. It was recorded by Traffic, written by Winwood/Capaldi, and last time I checked, Winwood still goes out on the road and plays it for people. Play it for yourself, but sit back and listen carefully, theres a lot happening. OK, John Barleycorn may be more coherent, but Low Spark is the Traffic album (and the song) for me. The melody is memorable, the singing is strong, and the piano foundation is dreamy, but for me its the sax line from Chris Wood that brings it home.
Reading mail attachments
My MUA of choice is mutt, a descendent of the original elm. It can handle MIME attachments, but not well. The mail from Dr Tagkalidis had about 8 PDF attachments, which were not the easiest to view, so I bounced the message to gmail and looked at it there, confirming that other MUAs don't do very well with this kind of document either. Each document was presented as an icon with three different sensitive areas, one to display directly, one to download, and another that took me a while to understand. After reading one document, I got the message safe to drive , which I suppose made sense given that it didn't relate to a procedure.