The “Artist radio” feature is promising, but limited to songs by (manually?) pre-selected, related artists. The other radio feature only lets you pick decades and genres. Spotify could really use a sprinkle of some of that Music Genome magic that Pandora uses. Browsing the music catalog, they show you exactly the information you want, and don’t skimp on listing full discography on one page, which is pretty cool. Though, if only the play queue and history persisted across app restarts…

What I really appreciate is that it feels like care was taken in the design of the app. While it’s nice to read that Spotify does aggressive caching on the client and uses P2P distribution, it’s a completely different, blown-away feeling when it actually works smoothly and nearly instantaneously. (Okay, granted, music is relatively low bit rate.) The UI is equally slick: “Top 10″ lists are presented as a gridview with the top 3 items showing album art, a song’s popularity is always shown next to a song, there’s song de-duplication in search results and everything (searches, albums, artists, songs) can be grabbed as a link.

• security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy - Disable/bypass same-origin policy enforcement in Firefox for local files

I grabbed the dependency I was missing (you might need others, like libjpeg and libpng3 that I already had around) and the latest source from git

sudo fink install fontforge git
git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git \
wine-git

Of course, it’s good practice not to muddy up your source tree, so build in a separate directory

mkdir bwine-git
cd bwine-git

Running just `configure` generates complaints about missing libxslt, libpng, and libjpeg. For libpng and libjpeg, I just needed to point to Fink’s libraries and headers under /sw. It took a little digging to figure out pkg-config had been installed by Fink, but since I wanted to use the system libxml and libxslt under /usr, I had to point pkg-config to the .pc files in /usr/lib/pkgconfig[1].

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig \
CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/include \
LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib ../wine-git/configure

I’m directed by configure to `make depend && make`; I purposely leave out a -j2 since 1) it’s a hot day and I don’t want to kill my poor MacBook Pro, and 2) I don’t remember if it works correctly

make depend && make

And finally, test it works

./wine notepad.exe

Unfortunately, I get the message that “Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than or equal to 2.0.5.” Let’s point dyld to our X11 libs (where FreeType lives), and try again

DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/X11/lib \
./wine notepad.exe

Success!

[1] It seems that Wine’s autoconf script takes the value returned from pkg-config, if pkg-config exists, without trying the alternative (values from xslt-config and xml2-config, in this case), even if pkg-config returns an empty string. I might get around to submitting a patch.

In my configuration, sdb1 and sdc1 are the partitions currently part of my RAID-1 md0. sdd is one of the 750GB disks. I’m adding one 750GB disk at a time, because 1) I want at least two copies of my data to be available at all times and 2) I only have one free drive bay and don’t want disks dangling next to the machine for hours.

1. Change the number of active devices in the array from two to three. This will cause any newly added drive to become active (i.e. actually write the array’s data onto the new drive)
   

   mdadm -G /dev/md0 -n 3

2. A little burn-in testing for the new disk
   

   badblocks -svw -t random -p 2 /dev/sdd

3. Partition, not forgetting to set the partition type to 0xfd, Linux raid autodetect
4. Add the new drive as a spare to the existing array
   

   mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd1

5. Once recovery is done (check `mdadm -D /dev/md0`), fail and remove one of the old disks from the array
   

   mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/sdc1 -r /dev/sdc1

6. Shred the removed drive
   

   shred -v -n 2 -z /dev/sdc

7. (Physically) swap out the removed drive and replace it with the second new one
8. Repeat steps 2-5 above for the second new disk. Hold off on the shredding, as this is going to be our backup
9. Reset the number of active devices in the array to two
   

   mdadm -G /dev/md0 -n 2

10. Grow the array
    

    sudo mdadm -G /dev/md0 --size=max

11. Let it resync, then unmount and resize the filesystem
    

    umount /home
resize_reiserfs /dev/md0
mount /home


12. Finally, if everything seems okay, shred that second old disk
    

    shred -v -n 2 -z /dev/sdb

…and we’re done! The one annoying thing is that with testing and a couple of resyncs, you end up with loads of down time between really short and simple tasks. So it’s possible (and I speak from experience) to stretch this weekend project out over a whole week.

While PayPal is providing the Security Key, the key is actually a VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) device … VeriSign is actually an OpenID provider and allows you to link your Security Key to your OpenID.

So give PayPal $5, get one of these SecurID-like devices in the mail 10 days later, link it to VeriSign’s OpenID provider, and boom you get two-factor OpenID authentication. Assuming your email, blog, photo sharing site, etc are hooked into OpenID, you have a little less to worry about when you’re on the road using some random internet cafe terminal.

As a bit of background, let me tell you where I’m coming from: I went to Chinese school for years as a kid and didn’t really learn much of anything. I was never fluent, never really learned enough characters to sufficiently read (let alone write), and then I just stopped caring for some amount of time. Now, I’m back for more learning.

So, here are the tips:

• ITABC Input Method

  I haven’t really used Windows in years, but last time I tried, I don’t think it had the pervasive Unicode support to even display Chinese characters in most apps. That said, I was nicely surprised when I found OS X 10.5 comes with a slew of Traditional and Simplified Chinese Input Methods built in. The one I use, ITABC, is dead simple. You just enter pinyin without tones and choose from candidate matches. There are plenty of places online (here’s one at Yale) that can walk you through setting it up.

• CEDICT for Apple Dictionary

  Apple includes a dictionary application in OS X. No big deal, right? Well, it’s actually pretty cool, because you can add your own custom dictionaries that integrate as seamlessly as the built-in dictionaries. CEDICT is a Chinese-English dictionary project (here’s an online dictionary based on CEDICT) that’s available as a user dictionary for Dictionary.app. Even better, it also has pronunciations (little sound bites you can play) embedded in dictionary entries.

  Here’s CEDICT for Apple Dictionary at Apple Downloads. Just download it and drop it into your /Library/Dictionaries (or ~/Library/Dictionaries).

• Dictionary.app integration throughout OS X

  I mentioned seamless integration in that last bullet point. Well, in the Apple way, the dictionary is integrated throughout the system. Hover over some text, hit a hotkey (defaults to Cmd-Ctrl-D, but might I suggest F1), and a little panel pop up (inline, in your application) with the definition.

  This hint at Mac OS X Hints reminds us that we can hold down the dictionary hotkey to continuously get the definition of whatever word is currently under the cursor. Say you’re scanning news.google.cn and there are a handful of words you don’t know. Just hit that hotkey, the dictionary entry panel pops up in Safari, and it moves with you as you move the cursor across the sentence.

If the default popup panel is too small for your tastes, this post has a link to a modified DictionaryPanel.app (drop it in /Applications/Dictionary.app/Contents/SharedSupport) that enlarges the popup panel window. Alternatively, you can open up DictionaryPanel.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/PopupWindow.nib in Interface Builder and just need to change the size of both the popup window and its content. Be sure to make a backup first!

• ChinesePod on iTunes

  Alright, so this last one might be a strech, but I found out about ChinesePod, which is a podcast with lessons in spoken Mandarin. It helps that the podcasters are pretty amusing. How does this tie in? Well, iTunes is setup to scrape the newest lessons and syncs them automatically with my iPod, so I can listen on my way to work. Zero effort necessary!

Alright. That’s it for now. If you know of any other tips, please do share!

Note: This might seem like one big rave for OS X, but I tried really hard to keep that to a minimum. Apple’s just too cool

Today, I had a footlong club for lunch (where, oddly enough, I ran into my roommate). Fast forward a couple hours to dinner time, and my roommate tells me he’s going back to Subway and convinces me to go back again too. Two feet of club sandwiches in one day.

Anyway, what I wanted to share is this: I always walk to Subway, and this map shows how far Subway is from my apartment. It’s less than two blocks, probably two minutes to walk. But my roommate offered to drive there. And we drove there. We drove two blocks to go to Subway.

Just wanted to share.

This external drive, for reasons of compatibility and account restrictions, needs to eventually be formatted on my Mac to ext2, using ext2fsx (another post on the bugginess of ext2fsx later). Below is a list of ways I ran across to stress the disk.

Ideas for stressing a disk on OS X:

1. format the disk with “secure erase” to write dummy data to the entire disk
2. just format the disk ext2/fsck it; the inode placement should give good coverage of the disk without taking SO LONG*
3. run `e2fsck` (fsck_ext2) with the -c -c option which invokes badblocks to read/write each block to find and track bad blocks.

I started with the first, but realized badblocks is probably a better tool for the job (is there a native BSD equivalent?) save for the fact that you don’t get much seeking going on. The second one might address that, or maybe reading the disk’s block device while doing something else might induce the contention to give you the necessary seeking.

*A side gripe: since disk capacities (I have a 500GB external drive) have been growing faster than disk bandwidth (perhaps my fault for using 480Mbps USB2), reading or writing an entire drive takes on the order of HOURS (over two hours twenty minutes best case for my setup, and easily twice that from my experience today). It just never really affected me until now, and I’m kind of annoyed.

The day before leaving for China, I browsed some travel websites and found out that an American Express card will get you personal check cashing services at some Bank of China branches. Of course, the internet didn’t yield much information, so I gave American Express’s Global Assist line a call. I was floored that the lady offered to call their China offices and the Bank of China to determine if my cards would work for cashing personal checks.

So, wow. The intent was great. All this nice service. I think I called on a Saturday, expected a call back Sunday night (Monday morning in China). Unfortunately, that call never came and I left on my trip.

Long story short, I decided to try FreeBSD 7.0 (ZFS built in!). The last time I used FreeBSD was to shape traffic in a network testbed. This time, I’m looking for dead-simple usability. I want my WinPrinter to work plug and play, X to start outta the box in high res, and all that jazz.

First step, downloading the cd images and making a dvd image from that.

More later…

Seriously, they’ve got to be kidding. Maybe ACM isn’t familiar with their target audience, but a four-function flip-top calculator (granted it looks like it also has clock and calendar functions in its awkward display) is just not the way to incentivize students to join.

Please, stop with this branded junk.

Alas, here’s how I solved it:

I have a relatively short domain name (tkho.net), and my dirt cheap webhost (NearlyFreeSpeech.NET) lets me create virtually unlimited CNAME records, allowing me to creating mappings from x.tkho.net, xx.tkho.net, etc to the names of servers that I frequently use. I add tkho.net. to the list of search domains that my DNS resolver checks (if it can’t find the record q., it’ll try q.tkho.net.), and now, `ssh tkho@q` works perfectly, across all my machines, and `ssh tkho@q.tkho.net` when I’m not on my machine.

* names removed to protect the innocent.

It’s crunch time, and I have one project+paper and two survey papers to complete in the next two weeks.

/insert witty closing here/

In about a year, I’ll have saved time on this endeavor.

Reality: Online storage generally isn’t cheap

That is, until Amazon’s S3 came onto the scene last year. I’d heard of duplicity and knew it had backend support for S3, so I figured that it couldn’t be too hard to setup. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a place online that ties everything together, so I’ll try to do that here.

Background: Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is cheap, available storage. How cheap? $0.15 each GB-month, and $0.20/GB transfer. duplicity gives you “encrypted, bandwidth-efficient backup using the rsync algorithm.” Well, good enough for me. Let’s start.

On my Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) machine, I first had to get librsync-dev:

sudo apt-get install librsync-dev

Then, I got duplicity-cvs and installed it:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/duplicity \
co duplicity

cd duplicity
dist/makedist 0.4.3
tar xzf duplicity-0.4.3.tar.gz
cd duplicity-0.4.3
python setup.py install ??prefix=/home/tkho

If you install into your home folder, make sure to set the PYTHONPATH:

export PYTHONPATH=/home/tkho/lib/python2.4/site-packages

For duplicity to use the S3 backend, you need the BitBucket library. Once downloaded, install it:

tar xzf BitBucket-0.4a.tar.gz
cd BitBucket-0.4a
python setup.py install ??prefix=/home/tkho

Now, everything is installed so we can start a sync. On a side note, it took about half an hour for my S3 account to start working.

export PASSPHRASE=password
export S3KEY=your_s3key
export S3SECRET=your_s3secret
duplicity /home/tkho/sync s3+http://duplicity_sync

That’s it! Add that to a daily or weekly cron and you have cheap, off-site backups. And, since you’re using duplicity, you get snapshots for free!

Lastly, don’t forget to grab Jets3t Cockpit–it’s a GUI file browser for your S3 data.

He’s still out there making the world a better place for millions of hackers. Here’s part of an email I got from him the other day:

Anyway, you know how you were always complaining about diff generating hard to read patches because the lines get intermingled? I’m working on that problem now, so if you have any really horrible looking patch files you think should look better in the next version of diff (assuming my work gets in), feel free to send them to me so I can be sure to cover those cases.

1. I have a lot of stuff. My closet is packed, and I have the usual desk, bed and bookshelves, along with a load of books, a bunch of kitchen stuff (some unopened after two years) and computers galore. Since I work during the week and have a company picnic on Sunday, I’m aiming to move the bulk of my goods tomorrow.
2. I have to move home between August 8 and whenever I move up to Berkeley. That means I’ll have to endure a 30 mile, 1 hour (in light traffic) commute through downtown and mid-city LA. Obviously I’m going to try to avoid this, which means getting to work by 7AM and leaving past 8PM (which isn’t that bad considering it is actually my 10:30 to midnight schedule shifted a couple hours).
3. I don’t have a place in Berkeley. The lack of a place hinders my ability to move into a place in Berkeley. The current plan is to rent a public storage locker and dump my stuff there while I either a) live in a hotel room or b) bum on a couch while looking for a place. Oddly enough, as my move date gets nearer, I get less worried about not having a place.

Update 12/9/2006: I found an even better way to get IMAP backups with the aptly named imapbackup.py script.