Top-left: The older days of Apple who have recently sidled next to Intel; Top-right: So-called Microsoft’s Hardware Department; Bottom: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM (*NIX)

A very unusual story comes from eWEEK. Microsoft have apparently demonstrated Linux to their audience.

While the answer is unclear, Microsoft Corp. surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show here this weekend by allowing a third party to present a “hands-on lab” that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software…

…the lab let attendees, many of whom were not familiar with Linux, experiment with KDE (K Desktop Environment) as well as see the Apache Web server in action…

Quite frankly, I consider this to be yet another attempt at being cocky. It was not too long ago that Microsoft paid one of the most popular bloggers in the world to evangelise their company and software products. They also scheme to adopt a large group of bloggers who will preach about Microsoft ‘goodness’. Biassed journalism — now isn’t that something that Microsoft can buy? I also wonder if they demonstrated Linux on some antiquated Debian distribution.

According to the BBC, Open Source begins to have its impact on schools in Britain.

In open source software (OSS), the underlying computer code is freely available so users can alter it and publish new versions, to benefit the community.

Leslie Fletcher, chair of governors at Parrs Wood High School in south Manchester and campaigns manager for the UK’s Unix and Open Systems User Group, offers a personal perspective on how schools can benefit.

Manchester made this courageous step, which came to my attention via the Manchester Linux Users Group. There was another recent and much more widespread initiative in Michigan.

There is a true advantage to having audio stored locally, as in the case of off-line podcasting. There is full control, in general, over the audio data in question. This means that podcasts can be sped up to fit the preferences of the listener. There is an XMMS plug-in called SndStretch (shown to the left) which I absolutely adore. It can speed up audio to be up to twice as fast, without change in pitch. No more squeaky voice due to change in pace. An half-hour show can be listened to it in only 15 minutes. This also works for music, which makes it more entertaining and variable.

Getting just the valuable data from pages

eeds have definitely revolutionised the way we use the Internet. We can efficiently seek and exploit content without having to undertake laborious navigations in sites. The content is delivered to the user so there is no need to actively obtain it or ever spend time re-reading segments of text.

I have just finished brushing up the script I developed for syndicating static pages that do not offer feeds. Windows users can use it under Cygwin; Mac and Linux user can use it at much great ease. All details and code are contained in the more comprehensive page.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

n item I have just come across (hat tip Justin Moore) speaks about excluding MSNBot based on poor performance. MSNBot (and Yahoo! likewise) consume a great deal of bandwidth, but are barely used as search engines by the Internet audience.

From Justin:

• Exhibit A – MSNbot Crawl hits = 9561
• Bandwidth used = 124.43 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ Google = 683* [sic.*]

• Exhibit B – Googlebot Crawl hits = 3415
• Bandwidth used = 51.74 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ MSN = 41 [sic.*]

…

So, effective immediately:

  User-agent: MSNBot
  Disallow: /

* Order of the visits is wrong and should be reversed.

I spotted similar statistics on my domain, with Google as the top referrer at almost 20,000 visits/month. MSN remain at a miserable 200 and take almost as much bandwidth as Googlebot. I have plenty of bandwidth to spare; So, I might as well let Microsoft spend crawling time in vain.

Ever wondered how much you listened to a particular song?

XMMS possesses a great extent of flexibility. It provides facilities which, when customised appropriately, can dump complete song descriptions. XMMS can then progressively, accumulatively add song data to log files. Timestamps imply the duration of listening, which lead to possible future extensions, e.g.:

• Automatically parse (scan, hash, then analyse) the log file/s
• Compute an average listening time — that is before skipping to another track — for each individual song
• Erase music that is frequently skipped or just output a ‘prospective deletion list’ to another file

Input/output operations are made quite simple. These can be invoked as command-line strings whenever a new track begins. It is a built-in XMMS plug-in, which can be found under Preferences » Song Change » Configure (see illustration below)

Add the following line to the “Song change” Command field:

(date; echo %s) >> ~/My_playlists/playlist.log

I am providing an example log file, assembled naturally (not artificially. Honest!) over 20 minutes or so. I still need to get rid of the doubly appearances, apparently caused by xmms-kde in my dock (screenshot on the right). As well as giving a minimal user interface, xmms-kde enables control of the player with CTRL+SHIFT+keypad even if the player is neither visible nor in focus.

A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.

UPDATE 26/06/2005: The following command, which can be set to become a nightly cron job, will slice the large log file so that it is composed of daily ‘chunks’:

mv ~/[Path]/playlist.log ~/[Path]/playlist-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.log

This can be extended to form an annual and monthly hierarchy of directories.

See the later extension: producing history spreadsheets

Some months ago, an automatic and effective way of obtaining music was described: no need to run any heavy graphical program; no need to select music (only sources of music of the desired genre); no limits on bandwidth or volume.

Taking this further, Dr. Scott Tobkes explains about his method of bringing commericals to a halt.

Something I’ve had fun doing lately is recording live of archived streaming audio from radio stations around the country

There are innumerable subjects and programs. I record it to mp3 or wav, and listen in my car or PC, while fast-forwarding through the commercials. I know that there are aggregators that will make this a seamless process like Ipodder.

I don’t like to call them podcasts. I use this program…