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Summary: Tonight we decided to talk about Groklaw and fake/bot Twitter accounts

In addition to the above, we also covered Internet trolls, GNU/Linux advocacy, copyright maximalists with a sense of entitlement, etc. Tim will post the show notes very shortly.

The show ends with Tim’s selected tracks, which are titled “Virus” and “The Curse and the Serpent”. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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arvey and I are about 50 years apart (in terms of age) and I met him about 10 years ago when he and his wife came to visit. Harvey has been somewhat of a mentor to me since then; in return I did all that I could to offer Harvey assistance (mostly technically) and we made a good pair. About 5 years ago as a sort of humour motivated by boredom (as I had just helped him launch his good site) we had the following images created, the latter one being a picture of me at age 15 in Wengen and one of Harvey as a young adult (back in the 60s or thereabouts).

Motivated by these old pictures which by mere coincidence resemble one another, Harvey has just created the following:

Thank you, Harvey, for the inspiration and advice you’ve given me over the years.

esterday I dumped visual media players — a decision that I stand up for at least for now — instead using more flexible scripts to play just particular parts of songs/tracks that I enjoy, even repeatedly. I use mplayer and bash to do the heavy lifting. This is handy when good segments, e.g. one part of a long concert, need to be isolated. Segments like these are usually to be found in very large files, which can be found either by name:

find -type f | grep PATTERN

To isolate large tracks (by file size), use something like:

find . -type f -size +{10000}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

$ find . -type f -size +50000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

The self-explanatory shell script to write would look something like

mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volO/AugMix.mp3  -ss 0:20:0 &
sleep 600
killall mplayer
mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volJ/concert.ogg -ss 0:35:0 &
sleep 200
killall mplayer

Enjoy.

Direct download as Ogg (1:39:18, 30.4 MB) | Direct download as MP3 (45.5 MB)

Summary: With two tracks and about a dozen discussion areas, the three of us convene again

THIS evening’s episode moved between many subjects including some which we wanted to cover yesterday but lacked the time to address. Show notes will be up soon.

The show ends with “Open War” and also “You Are Goodbye” by Holly Conlan (from SXSW 2009 Showcasing Artists). We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Direct download as Ogg (1:36:50, 29.5 MB) | Direct download as MP3 (44.3 MB)

Summary: Operating systems, form factors, and some Ubuntu derivatives

THIS episode was recorded on a wired connection and it covered many interesting topics from the past couple of weeks. Tim will post some show notes at a later date/time. Update: the show notes are up now.

The show ends with “Tears and Rain” (the song, not real tears and rain). We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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currently work on a very fascinating project which deals with 3-D face recognition, as already stated back in January. Progress has been noticeable recently (easier to get coding done when the Internet is mostly unavailable due to Bad Telecom [1, 2, 3]) and the accompanying text is now about 50 pages long.

A few observations about MATLAB: the programming framework has not really developed much since 2003. It’s either quite stagnant or improved only in unseen places. I did not forget how to develop a GUI environment very rapidly.

A few observations about PCA: the method is a little antiquated and it can probably be outperformed by more problem-specific implementations of algorithms we explore.

A few observations about Bad Telecom (or Bastards Telecom, although some people view the word bastard as too strong): they only ever serve the customer properly if he/she becomes a threat to the reputation of the business. It is sad that customers must be seen as a risk before they can actually get progress made.

Being a Bastards Telecom customer means a lot of things, some of which include:

• Waking up every morning for two weeks only to test a phone line
• Being told by a Bastards Telecom agent that it’s OK if the line is not working, it’s just part of how it’s supposed to work (it’s not, they made an error and then arrogantly disregarded my advice)
• Taking two complete days off work to wait by the intercom from 7AM to 6PM, thinking that perhaps within a minute the delivery person will arrive (but in vain, surely)
• Waiting on line (in a queue) for one hour to reach an actual person. This is not like holding the phone for one hour knowing that after one hour someone will answer it. This is a case of a one-hour anticipation for answer on the other line (you don’t want to miss an actual real person who doesn’t just ask you to enter digits after waiting for half an hour).
• Not doing proper exercise for a week, just making phonecalls at the gym and waiting for calls back (nearly having to apologise for being a polite (but mistreated) customer
• Having to travel for half an hour just to get to a phone with a working line so that about 20 phonecalls (like the above) can be made
• Having to ask friends and business ownerz for an apology for using the line for hours and hours, draining battery, taking up their time, and costing them telephone charges
• Not being able to get in touch with friends (except using slow medium like E-mail)
• Having your friends receive unwanted and unexpected phonecalls from Bastards Telecom, which somehow decided one’s friend can also be treated like someone’s secretary
• Bastards Telecom contacting someone’s friend on the work telephone, which in turn causes this friends problems at work
• Having general problems at work not just due to lack of an Internet connection (I do both my jobs primarily from home) but a telephone line, too
• Being told a 12 month contract is suddenly an 18 months contract despite being told and then confirming contradictory information by sales staff and signing a deal based on that information
• Being put on hold for 15 minutes while one agent listens to the recording of an older call with another agent, only to then misrepresent the customer and put all blame on the customer, obviously to defend Bastards Telecom. Humility is a disallowed term among Bastards Telecom.
• Having an agent hang up despite the customer being patient and polite
• Friends arrive and leave in anger because they cannot get in contact and therefore cannot access the building or discuss times
• Missing a few nights out for being off the telephone grid and thus unable to coordinate
• Being away from some of one’s crucial belongings, such as work equipment
• Being unable to wish the parent a “happy birthday”
• Failure to contact businesses for crucial transactions, which leads to a lot of trouble
• Having to travel by foot to a lot of places because there is no other way to make contacts
• Having to leave “telephone number” fields blank in a lot of place, then having to come back later to fill those missing parts
• Making family and friends worried that contact cannot be made (which leads to false assumptions)
• Failure to accept the shipping of a hub (for broadband) because there is no working line at home for Royal Mail to get through to the customer

In conclusion, don’t choose Bastards Telecom. Their monopoly is far from deserved, it’s more like a government franchise and they will also Phorn your phone, spying on your every activity online for for benefit of marketing companies that will pressure you to buy things you do not need and share personal information about your life and your loved one.

Bastards.

And the worst part remains ahead. They may bill me for someone else’s phonecalls, in which case more bureaucracy will be required to resolve issues relating to refunds.

What does it mean when Bastards Telecom makes false promises about broadband services and due date? It’s getting late, so the following list will be very incomplete (imagine being offline for 3 weeks when all your work is online, employers included):

• pay through the nose for mobile broadband, having had to spend hours finding an appropriate package at the shop (25 British pounds or nearly 40 dollars for just 2 gigabytes)
• struggle for hours to bring back up a failed mobile broadband connection
• work on single-head rather than dual-head display for a while, being away from one’s crucial files for several more days too (impossible for getting work done)
• not being able to make VoIP calls and make up for lack of landline (which worked fine until Bastards Telecom botched it, then claimed it’s just fine)
• not being able to blog, manage sites, etc.
• not being able to transfer any large files
• changing one’s browsing habits to account for caps
• being throttled and taking an entire night to upload just 2 audio files while the computer stays connected and uses up valuable resources
• many other Internet-related implications, as expected (I’m getting tired just thinking about it)

Bastards.

The whole thing is confirmed to be BT’s own fault. They admit it now, albeit shyly. Their staff totally messed up (maybe at risk of being fired), so right now one of them is constantly phoning my friend’s work phone (4 times today), asking urgently to meet me on Saturday, some time between a range of 5 hours (great! A fourth day having to be stuck at home, without connection to anything). So he now puts my friend’s work in jeopardy, not just my own. I don’t want anybody fired, but I know BT has been running around with the axe quite a lot recently (given their poor standards, no wonder). I am not asking BT for much, all I want is my life back, please.

N.B. – In case anyone from BT reads this, please look up VOL011-479058023564 and VOL011-47251182944.