Journal of a Sysadmin

Music in my Life

I was introduced to the sixty one tonight by the woman that has been giving me the gift of music for the past five years. From ska to folk, from Alexi Murdoc to Dar Williams and everything in between.

I had a hard time turning it off tonight because I want to hear all the unheard ‘da kine’ music there is and it just can’t be all heard in one night, there’s too much out there if you have ears.

Thank you again Jaime, some day I hope I get to repay you.

iPhones and Upgrades

Had Friday and today off work as we were going dog camping on the weekend. That went well(ish) and today we had to go and do something about phones…

See, we wouldn’t have had to today really except that I had to wash Jaime’s with the HE washer. I guess it washes phones as well as it washes cloths, as it washed the good out of it. The phone is now only usable as a wedge type door stop (the razor is too small to use as a coaster).

Of course, as soon as her phone went missing my phone decided too completely croak so a good part of the day was spent digging around finding papers and deciding what phone and plan to get Jaime. We then proceeded to go to the Fido store and pickup a new Z310 for me (to replace the dead one) and an iPhone for Jaime…

All the hype I think is worth it. The phone seems solid and she’s posted to flickr, facebook, and now her journal. Mail works, we works and most importantly the phone actually works. Visual Voicemail btw is kind of cool, integrating the iPhone with voicemail so that you can navigate your voicemail from the phone menu instead of having to call it. Nice feature.

Data plans still suck here. Currently we are on the limited time offer $30 6G plan. Hopefully it goes down from that.

Tonight I upgraded all 4 installs of WP here. I’m happy to report that my diff and patch method still works!

Yay, it means 3 minutes instead of 15 per journal!.

Christmas Time is Here!

Christmas today was a blast.

Little J had so many presents I think he was overwhelmed. So much so he didn’t get to open all of them and there are still 3 wrapped and under the tree, he could be saving them for tomorrow =).

jhb loved what I got her, though I knew she would. Only problem is there’s a little hack you have to do to the iPod Touch in order to get it to work with Linux and that hack requires the use of iTunes.

Did you know, iTunes won’t work from within a xen VM? It can’t see the USB device I guess. It also won’t work from within wine (I tried both of these). It also will not work on a PowerPC Mac with Darwin, that’s too old. You need at least Tiger to run iTunes and Lepard won’t run on a 733MHz G4… It also will not work on Windows XP base install, which jhb found out about tonight before she was forced to install SP2, just to run iTunes…

Did you also know that we have a grand total of 3 copies of windows in our house. One which is for middle C’s computer, a copy of XP home. I have a copy of XP Pro which was a free (as in beer) copy distributed by M$ at a seminar I went to on storage but it is damaged to the point of being unusable at the moment. The third is for adelle, which is jhb’s old Dell Optiplex, the one she moved here with.

It’s a good thing she had that CD, but cause now (after about 15 hours) she is installing adelle and she will use that to load the 1.1.1 firmware and crack the Jail on the iPood, then upgrade it to 1.1.2 again and we’ll be able to copy data via wireless using gtkpod. Can’t wait to see that work, since it’s been all FREAKING day getting to this point…

Makes me want to *never* purchase anything running any proprietary software on it, evern. I mean why the hell can’t Jobs get them to write a Linux iTunes or at least release enough specs so that the community can flash their iPood without resorting to booting Tiger on a G4.

But jhb likes it, so I guess it’s worth it.

BTW, after the Sony root kit BS, I still haven’t bought much if anything in the way of Sony hardware. I unfortunately can’t see doing that with Mac right now even though they desperately needs their heads pulled out of their asses… Please someone at Apple, make them port some of that to Linux!

Canadian Music Creators Coalition

Go directly to www.musiccreators.ca and sign up for their mailing list. If you know of a Canadian musician that would support their cause, tell that musician to sign up and support their cause.

We need to have a lot of involvment with this. Put a link to their site on your web page. Blog or Journal about it. Make it known.

I’d like to say thank you to those who decided to start this coalition. Without Canadian musicians speaking out we would not have the true picture of this issue. Thank you again to every single musician that signs up to show their support.

This is a good thing. GO CANADIANS!

Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group, the Canadian Company that produces albums for Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies, Dido, Guster, Sarah McLachlan and others is joining the fight against the RIAA.

All I can say is Go Canadian Artists. I do question where some of our more libral artists are in this debate. Where are those who pushed so hard for human rights in other countries or who were so very cutting edge at one time or another?

Maybe in Tokyo? Maybe he’s Last Year’s Man?

Whichever it is I wish those people would come forward and ask the question, before the time for asking has passed.

A decent digital audio player, buy one!

This is a company we need to support.

Samsung (of all companies) is making a DMP (digital media player) that supports the open standard Ogg and is a USB mass storage device. Firmware still has to be done via a windows interface, for now…

We bought s YP-C1 for one of the kids and it seems to work really well with Linux.

Oh, and it doesn’t support the DRM stuff that other players are starting to support.

Muscian questions copy protection

Perfect example of the self serving mega corps.

A musician states in this New York Times article (free login required):

To be clear, I certainly don’t encourage people to pirate our music. I have poured my life into my band, and after two major label records, our accountants can tell you that we’re not real rock stars yet. But before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won’t happen without a lot of people playing us for their friends, which, in turn, won’t happen without a fair amount of file sharing.

As listeners we don’t want it. As a systems administrator I wouldn’t want this software on a machine on my network. Musicians have not asked for and can not really use this software.

DRM software serves one single purpose. The large mega corporations which control the music we listen to think it will drive money into their hands. They no longer control the means of distribution and they want to fight that until the end.

I hope the end comes soon.

Thank you to the New York Times for having the balls to publish this and to Damian Kulash Jr. for writing it. Flakey name for a band (OK Go), but maybe I’ll have to check it out anyway

New way to get music

This is great.

Lots of bands have started posting (in recent time at least, and generally smaller bands) MP3 examples of their music, tracks from CDs, videos, and demo recordings, CD sales info, and then post their tour dates. I think this is a perfect way to get the word out about themselves and to market themselves WITHOUT COMPANIES LIKE SONY.

I found one decent site www.stoplookandlistenzine.com which lists many startup bands with tracks. Another site is www.soundclick.com where they actually chart music based on listener feedback.

This is the way I feel music is intended to be. If you want to sell a CD yes do it and if I like your music I might even buy it but if I never get to test out your music how will I know to buy your CD? Oh, and do NOT base your CD prices on the big companies prices. If you can’t sell a CD for $10.00 and make a decent turn around on it you are doing something drastically wrong… Thing is, I refuse to pay $25.00 for a single f’ing CD that I may not even like!