jon.dowland.name log

What if you have a mis-behaving electronic device, which might corrupt files you store on it? I'm interested in tools to inspect incremental backups, look at file changes and alert me if they are suspicious. For example, if an MP3 changes, did the MPEG data change, or the ID3 tag, or something else? An ID3 change is likely to be on purpose, MPEG data less so. Similar for JPEGs and EXIF metadata. I decided to poke around in my backups of my music player. I discovered some pretty weird stuff.

If you have an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 PCI sound card or anything else using the "Envy24" chip, be aware: at present neither the GNOME3 "sound" control panel applet nor the pulseaudio tool "pavucontrol" expose enough of the card's controls to play any audio. You need to have alsa-utils or alsa-utils-gui installed and use envy24control to put the relevant sliders in the right places.

Very little done last night. Advocated a maintainer. My desktop computer is completely hosed as part of a wheezy update: many issues at once but one is GDM going into an infinite loop, spawning millions of X servers; another is something in the boot processes seemingly prodding /dev/sdc and failing. I'm not sure if I have time to get to the bottom of it, I might just reinstall from a d-i daily. Priority going forward should be to finish off the musicbrainz stuff.

And we've frozen!

Once again Debian day was somewhat compromised: this time by more DIY. I still managed a few bits and pieces, amortized over the rest of the week. I benefited from some train time this weekend.

One interesting side-effect of setting aside a regular slot of time for a task is that you are guaranteed to spend some time, perhaps not much, thinking about that task, every week. As a consequence, even one evening a week is enough for me to think about my Debian work at other times. This means I am in a better position to use any unplanned free time more effectively.

After a relatively long period of flux, I've managed to settle into a routine where I've got all the time I can dedicate to open source stuff bunched together: every Tuesday night. I've started calling it "Debian Day", although Debian won't get all that time exclusively.

One evening a week doesn't sound like much, but that's unfortunately a realistic amount given my other commitments. Still, having a firm idea of how much resource I have makes planning what I can and can't do much easier. It also means I need to be quite selective about what I spend my time on.

In (roughly) 2008 I read "Blood Music" — my first Greg Bear novel — and devoured it in a weekend, in only two or three reading sessions. That happens very rarely, and when it does I often wonder whether it's the quality of the writing or some combination of that and your personal moods and tastes at the time that is responsible. My next Bear was "Darwin's Radio" in mid-2010 which, whilst good, did not provoke the same feverish read. I might write short reviews for both at some point in the future, but right now I can't remember either well enough to do so.

I'd been curious about Jonathan Lethem ever since Cory Doctorow blogged a riveting review of 'Chronic City' on boingboing, but it was this short fictionalisation of Phil K Dick's early writing life that really made me curious to sample more of his work. It was then that I discovered that virtually no (physical) bookshop anywhere in my vicinity, first or second hand, had a single book by him in stock.

I started trying to maintain a "to read" list on my website, but instead I've signed up for goodreads and started to feed my lists into there. Feel free to recommend me things!

I've just — finally — finished reading Simon Reynold's dense "Rip it Up and Start Again": a history of post-punk music from 1978-1984.

I often think of music journalism in the terms that Zappa famously phrased as (roughly) "people who can't write, writing for people who can't read". This book sometimes suffers from that syndrome, of attempting to describe audio in terms of other senses, which sometimes wanders deep into synesthesia territory, but for the most part the book is coherent and enjoyable.