Thursday 09 September 2010

10 blogs from greatness

Yak shaving

'How I ditched Windows and embraced Linux' - the prequel.

On Saturday morning, I thought it might be fun to install Linux on my home computer. A year ago, I had experimented with a few Live CD's and actually installed Ubuntu (not officially supported) followed by Oracle Enterprise Linux (officially supported) on my work laptop (Thinkpad T61). For various reasons, I subsequently had to reverse that change so I thought it might be worthwhile and interesting to install Ubuntu on my own computer (an aging but reliable Dell 4500).

There was no problem with the computer, there was no problem with Windows XP. I am not a rabid, freedom loving, Microsoft hating individual. I just wanted to play around with Linux before 'Football Focus'.

As Norma also uses this computer (email, Web, Word documents), I decided to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot option alongside the existing stable Windows environment. This was firstly to evaluate whether Linux supported all my various peripherals and software requirements and secondly, let people continue to use Windows.

I dug out an old Ubuntu (8.04 - Hardy Heron) Live CD and started the installation process. When I came to partition the hard disk, I chose the 'Advanced' option so I could preserve all my existing data with 60GB allocated to Windows with another 20GB for Linux.

The re-partitioning failed; the 'ntfsresize' program helpfully told me with a typically cryptic Unix style error that '1028 is greater than 1024'. No matter - just get a Windows recovery disk and use the 'fdisk' utility to re-partition.

I booted from the Windows recovery CD. After a while I saw 'Files being copied for installation...' and wondered if I had missed the prompt to enter a DOS prompt enabling me to run fdisk. So, I hit 'Control-C' and rebooted. As I expected, my computer was now completely screwed as I had aborted during a full installation.

I sighed inwardly at my impetuousness and stupidity. I also blamed David Marsden who had helped sow this original tiny, little seed in my brain which was now turning into a long running saga and a complete waste of time and effort. Just to get back to where we had started. Almost.

This whole exercise was a classic example of Yak shaving as its finest. I was justifiably proud of myself.

I decided to postpone the Linux experiment to another day and simply re-installed Windows. One hour later, the machine was usable again. All my data was preserved so I took a full backup to an external USB drive. However, although none of my programs were installed and the Windows registry was pure and virginal, the 'Program Files' directory was horrendously cluttered with lots of unused folders.

Now I had a choice; dig out all those drivers and install disks for my Linksys Wireless Adapter, Canon printer, scanner, reinstall and reconfigure all the important software (Picasa, Firefox, Office, Outlook Express) so the machine would actually be usable again. Preferably before Norma got home and asked 'Can I just quickly check my email ?'

Alternatively, now I had a full backup, I could do the right thing, rebuild the computer completely and install Linux. So that's what I did. Only I didn't because I wasn't entirely sure Ubuntu was the best Linux distribution for me. Using the excellent, open source program InfraRecorder. I embarked on burning ISO images for all those distributions I was aware of, have seen recommended or reviewed recently.

I also perused DistroWatch to look for the most popular and used Dan Lynch's excellent, comprehensive, honest, balanced reviews of various Linux distributions.

The cast list, in no particular order:

October 14, 2009 | Filed under , , , , , and | Comments (View)

how I ditched iTunes and started living with Foobar 2000

[Obligatory hat tip to 'How to stop defragmenting and start living'. As an aside, if you're an Oracle DBA and haven't read this whitepaper, please do so. Now.]

I have used various devices and software over my 76 years on this planet to listen to music:

  • Record player
  • Cassette player
  • Transistor radio
  • Ears
  • WinAmp
  • SonicStage
  • Windows Media Player

18 months ago, I finally caved in and bought an iTouch which I use a lot; mainly for listening to music and podcasts at airports.

I duly downloaded iTunes in order to get my music library onto the iTouch. I seem to remember that iTunes couldn't play Windows Media Player files which was slightly irritating. In any case, with a sense of a new beginning and a fresh, clean start, I re-ripped all my music CD's into Apple's AAC format, added the missing album artwork and synchronised my music, photos and applications to the iTouch.

Over the last 18 months, Apple proceeded to add more and more 'features' to iTunes which I don't want or need:

  • Tighter integration with the iTunes store
  • Genius - some sort of recommendation engine closely linked to the above
  • Jukebox
  • A default assumption that I also wanted to install additional software packages: QuickTime, Safari and Mobile Me.

When Apple recently released iTunes 9, I suddenly realised I was downloading 98.4MB - just to play music.

It slowly dawned on me that, whenever I started iTunes, my (admittedly aging PC) was unusable for 40 seconds while iTunes initialised and CPU usage hit the roof.

I also realised that iTunes consumed a staggering 82MB of physical memory while playing a tune and this excessive memory consumption could increase to 134MB after connecting to the iTunes store.

I realised this was madness. Complete madness. Finally, I came to my senses and sought out alternative programs to replace the oversized, obese, bloated, multi-function and very slow iTunes.

I soon discovered Foobar 2000 which is a small, compact, lighweight audio player for Windows. I downloaded the program and was immediately struck by the size of the Foobar2000 distribution - 2,985KB, 2.81MB or 3,056,036 bytes to be precise.

This was already promising so I installed the program. I was pleasantly surprised that Foobar quickly imported my existing iTunes music library in its entirety and I was immediately able to play AAC encoded music. No need for additional plugins or codecs.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see Foobar 2000 start up instantaneously (no delay or hourglass here) and consume a slightly more reeasonable 25,888KB of memory.

However, all of this was redundant unless I could actually synchronise music to the iTouch as using two completely separate programs to mange my music was self-defeating. So I downloaded a Foobar extension promisingly named 'Ipod Manager' and configured it.

For a complete fresh start, I took the rather brave (or stupid) move of completely resetting the iTouch to the factory settings which deleted all data and promptly hit 'Sync' in Foobar.

Although it took a while, synchronisation was 100% successful and I even got a 'Preview' of what songs were going to added/removed from the iTouch. This feature was incredibly useful as it gives you a chance to abort if your entire music library is going to be (unexpectedly) deleted.

There were some minor issues - not all album covers were displayed on the iTouch. I discovered that iTunes embeds album artwork in the AAC file. I preferred Foobar's method of adding the album art to the folder as 'Cover.jpg' so you have complete control over the images used. Later on, I actually removed the embedded artwork completely.

What else was missing ? I previously used iTunes to manage podcasts although this was never really satisfactory as iTunes had a weird concept of when the status of a podcast should be modified to 'Listened'. I rather thought listening from start to finish would qualify but Apple obviously disagreed and repeatedly kept sync'ing old content onto the iTouch.

Foobar had another useful extension called 'PodCatcher' which worked brilliantly. It would automatically download new podcasts (in the background) and I was able to easily sync to the iTouch simply by including the new 'Podcasts' category to the synchronisation list.

I wasn't completely happy with the default UI of Foobar so I used the Columns UI extension to make it look slightly more usable with the album artwork displayed.

Foobar 2000 really is the complete music player - once you add the appropriate encoders, it can play virtually music in any format (FLAC, WMA, AAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis et al).

One great feature is that Foobar can perform conversion between the various formats. If I can summon up the energy to re-rip all my CD's yet again, I plan to rip all my music to a lossless format (FLAC) and Foobar would dynamically convert to the required lossy, compressed format during the sync to the iTouch.

Another couple of useful extensions for Foobar:

Although I am now blissfully almost iTunes free, I still need to use iTunes to update the software on the iTouch but I am delighted to say that is the sole extent of my iTunes usage. If I need to install any applications on the iTouch, I can do that directly from the iTouch.

It was particularly satisfying to copy my Foobar configuration and music library to my work laptop and completely remove iTunes from that computer.

October 10, 2009 | Filed under , , , , , and | Comments (View)
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