2009

There were 52 posts published in 2009 (this is page 4 of 6).

Tags in document organization

Just noticed the tags feature in Windows 7, which corresponds to keywords in Office 2007. It would be possible to forego folder organization and just use tags. Folders are an old fashioned way of organizing files, and we really should no longer be using these today. With tags we could also bring together files which would normally be stored separately, like photos and emails.

However it isn’t possible to add tags to other formats like pdf, rtf or odt. Although keywords can be added to Openoffice files within Openoffice, these are not recognized as tags by the file manager in Windows 7. That’s a pity.

Win 7 file manager

Experience with Windows 7 dualbooted with Ubuntu

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 in the empty partition of my laptop hard drive – the one that had held Windows Vista.  The latter stopped working a few months ago, as did HP’s rescue partition.  It was very simple to install Windows 7.  The only difficulty was finding the Windows boot manager after reinstalling the Linux boot manager grub.  Windows had placed it on the former rescue partition, for some reason.

My next difficulty was to get Windows 7 to work with my Ext3 Linux home partition, where I keep my data files.  Previously on Vista I’d been using Ext2fs.  It turns out that this works inadequately in Windows 7.  You have to go into the program on each startup and re-identify the drive letter.  I tried compatibility mode, etc.  Eventually I placed the program file in Windows startup folder.

The Linux partition was then recognized.  Windows file manager identified it clearly, and Itunes was able to find my music there.  But Picasa didn’t recognize it.

I had difficulty getting some programs to start on Windows 7.  Chrome and Flock browsers wouldn’t install.  With Flock, I changed to compatibility mode before the install, then it worked.

My final problem was that Windows 7 seems to make greater demands on the CPU than does Ubuntu.  The machine heated up more, and shut down a couple of times.  That happened for instance when Picasa was cataloguing my photos, while OpenOffice was simultaneously downloading.  Probably the overheating problem means that it’s time to get my laptop fan cleaned.  However, it’s significant that Ubuntu never reaches the threshhold that causes the computer to shut down. 

All in all, I liked Windows 7.  It has a few nice additions that make me wonder why they never thought of these before.  Such as the concept of turning My Documents, My Pictures, into libraries that contain other locations.

I will use it once in a while to sync music to my Ipod, and maybe to edit movies (after getting my laptop fan cleaned!), since I’m still not as happy with the Linux options for movie editing.

At this stage, Ubuntu remains for me a better choice for general use – there isn’t a strong enough reason to switch back to Windows 7.

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Saturday sailed by

In recent days I’ve had this strange thing: a bitter taste in the mouth after eating food.   It’s a recurring condition that comes, lasts a few days, then goes away again.  Every few months I get this.  Besides the bitter taste, there’s a slight discomfort in the upper part of the stomach sometimes.  Reading on the web, it seems to match most closely the symptoms of what’s called a hiatus hernia or hiatal hernia.  I think I’ll settle for that explanation, since it doesn’t sound all that serious.

After researching my maladies I got on with cleaning the house, then read a little more of Divisadero.  I’m plodding along slowly with that – probably because I’m spending too much time on computers these days.  I love Ondaatje’s books and read so far The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and many of the poems in The Cinnamon Peeler.

Then Deb came over.  She talked about the writing guide for activists that she is writing.  Later in the day we had a visit from two men from the German government who may be willing to help us with the Library project.  I met them together with Nava.

Dorit meanwhile had meetings with Frans and Hans from Holland.  Hans is director of an organization called Stichting Collusie, (translation to English) .  They aim “to advise socially and economically vulnerable groups in the area of sustainability, energy saving and environmental protection.”  Since they take volunteers and Yotam is currently checking possibilities for volunteering abroad, she also arranged an interview with him.

In between I looked at FriendFeed.  Found there a link to an interesting article and discussion to identity issues of Muslims in India. Some of the comments complained about the phenomenon of Indian college students rooting for Pakistan in cricket matches between the two nations.  That reminded me of the way Palestinian Israeli citizens often support foreign teams playing against Israel in soccer or basketball. 

On TV heard an interview with a speaker of Esperanto – a language that I would love to study one day.  It takes about 15 lessons by correspondence or through the web to learn the language.  The interview was with an astrophysicist, who appeared with his daughter, with whom he had spoken the language since she was a baby.  As against the popular conception, the creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof had never intended to replace existing languages, but to create a universal second language for everyone, which would be especially easy to learn.  The effect would actually be to preserve existing languages by not threatening them by cultural dominance.  This year is the 150th year of Zamenhof’s birth.  Too bad the idea never properly caught on.  But there’s a street named after him in Tel Aviv.

In the evening I looked up some more news feeds and links on Friendfeed.  Finally discovered a work around for my audio problem in the Flock browser.   There’s a Firefox extension rather pompously called “The Flash Video Resources Downloader”.  You click an icon in the taskbar and it finds the flash video.  You click another button to download the video in the suitable format.  Then I can open it in Totem.  Fine.  The only snag is having to wait for the entire video to download before listening.

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Shoddy journalism

Haaretz is considered to be Israel’s most important daily newspaper but in terms of professionalism it’s a mixed bag. Even more so the English web version. Today there was an article about an appeal by British professors to Leonard Cohen to cancel his planned Israel gig. The article relies for content almost entirely on the professors’ letter. The letter itself isn’t a great work of literature. By taking parts of it out of context, the article makes it appear worse than it is. The original letter was about 500 words. The Haaretz article is around half of that. If the online newspaper is somehow short of space, it could at least link back to the original. I suggested that in a talkback, and provided the link, but they didn’t publish it. That’s how I discovered that although the newspaper permits all kinds of racist and bigotted talk-backs, a simple matter like the original link to a letter that has been badly quoted, is out of the question.

Doesn’t that just typify “old journalism”? Present a mangled version of an opposing viewpoint, and deny your readers access to the original. Wouldn’t want them to form an independent opinion.

A new mouse


I purchased my third bluetooth mouse in a year today.  The first was a Level-One BLM-3000.    Quickly abandoned on grounds that it wasn’t comfortable, had poor battery life and frequently lost receptivity – leaving me wondering whether it was time to change the batteries again, or just something wrong with the connection.  The second was a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000.  A good mouse, but recently the middle button wore out – apparently from over-use (mainly from opening browser tabs).  It still works, but only when pressed hard and long.  Today I replaced this with a Logitech V470.  It’s a good looking two-tone grey and white, and is comfortable. One nice feature is that it takes regular AA batteries, rather than lower capacity AAAs.  I just hope this mouse stays with me longer than did the other two – Bluetooth mice or not cheap.

Journal – mainly about photo handling under Linux

I was somehow sick yesterday – woke up feeling very low energy.  In mid-morning I had loose bowel movements, throughout the day felt zift.  And it was also quite a busy day, with the annual test for the car, a visit from the guy that replaces our water filter, two trips to Modiin to take Yotam to work and back.  Then in the afternoon we bought him a new computer monitor.

Most of last weekend was spent moving files around and doing backups, in order to free a disk up for our new Nmix multimedia player. Then setting up the player itself.  I will talk about that some other time.  But the awkward thing is that somewhere during that process my laptop Windows partition, and even the HP restore partition got affected, such that I can’t use Windows, and have to use Ubuntu.  Previously I was flipping back between these every few weeks; probably eventually spending more time with Windows.

The data on the partition all seems to be there, and I was able to access and transfer it using Yotam’s Ultimate Boot Disk.  Just won’t let Windows start. 

So I’m stuck with Ubuntu, unless I get it fixed.  Truth is, I’m a bit worn out by the problems of both operating systems, and have found myself lusting for a Mac.  But, as my son Yonatan says, if I had a Mac I would probably find things to complain about that too.

Since I’m a bit of a fatalist, I took up using only Ubuntu as a challenge.  The most difficult thing for me under Linux is finding a way of working with photos.  Although photography is by no means the larger part of what I do, it is an area that has to be in order.  And the big obstacle to overcome is finding a Linuxcentric photo organizer and workflow.

I have done a major revisit to this subject in the last few days, trying the most commonly known applications and some less known options:  Picasa, Digikam, Gwenview, G-thumb, F-spot, Lightzone, Bibble Pro, as well as reading up on Geeqi and a couple of others.

What I need really, is actually what Picasa does rather well, except that Picasa under Linux chokes on my photo collection (it’s about 35,000 photos so far). I need something that imports photos from a camera, lets me organize them and handles light editing – preferably non-destructive.  I have a folder-based system, but also use tags (keywords).  I want to use both, and to be able to search for photos using both. I also want to have a quick way of uploading the photos to the web (I have been using Picasaweb.

All that turns out to be a tall order.  Picasaweb has the most elegant user interface I have seen for handling photos.  In a single screen, without any customization, it does everything I need to do.  It is super-fast, for browsing, searching, editing and sharing, and permits a brilliant workflow.   I think it’s a work of genius.  There are still a couple of things I don’t like about it, but all in all I’m happy.  But, as mentioned, the Linux version (which is based on the Windows emulator Wine) is less robust.

Under Linux, the best equivalent seems to be Digikam.  It has keywords, uses folders, can handle editing (not non-destructive as in Picasa), but, for some reason, on my machine it is almost unusable.  Slow and prone to freezing.  Again, the problem may be the large photo collection.

G-thumb does a reasonable job.  It’s fast and easy to use.  It uses a folder-based system.  It allows simple (not non-destructive) editing.  Instead of keywords, it relies on searchable comments.  Trouble is, the comments are recognized only in G-thumb, and it does not recognize IPTC keywords at all.  That means that any time spent in tagging (which is an exhaustive process) would be good only for G-thumb, or perhaps Gnome’s file manager. 

F-spot is just the opposite.  It relies only on tags, and does not allow a folder view.  It does tagging very well, and these are searchable.  The tags are generic IPTC standard, and are recognized outside of F-spot.  The problem is, that after you have invested so much time organizing a photo collection in folders, it just isn’t possible to go back and start tagging every single photo.

F-spot seems to be closest to I-photo under Mac.  I checked out I-photo in a display model in Office Depot today.  I don’t think that would work for me either. 

Lightzone and Bibble are two non-free photo managers and editors that work under Linux.  At up to $200 they are expensive.  But I would consider them if they did everything I want.  Lightzone does editing very well, and is supposed to handle Raw photos (which I don’t use).  Bibble seems to handle the photo-organization quite well and also allows editing.  Both programs are aware of and can handle tagging. Both do non-destructive editing, though they handle it in different ways.  Unfortunately neither have a search engine.  Lightzone has some problems navigating to my external hard drive.  Bibble has an interface based on dockable windows, which seems a bit messy to me.  A new version of Bibble has been promised for a long time.  I will wait and see what that offers.

Gwenview is nice mainly for viewing photos and is a bit limited.  Geeqi, based on an old “competitor” to GThumb, is in a very alpha-stage and is mentioned as being unstable and not recommended for serious use.  There are systems that use PHP and Appache, but these don’t seem a good option for work on a desktop computer.

So there I am – nothing really does everything that I need to do.  I will probably adopt a workflow that involves Picasa, GThumb and F-Spot.  Perhaps I will import photos in Picasa, use Picasa as an intermediate station, since it works quite well with a smaller number of photos.  In Picasa I can tag them, then archive them for later viewing in GThumb and F-Spot.  Sometimes, in order to work with photos in the archive, I can do the opposite – moving them to a folder that is watched by Picasa, doing quick editing, then sharing them from there by email or web.  There are a couple of things I’m still not sure about in this process, such as Picasa’s handling of keywords, and how best to use Picasa as a way-station.

Perhaps, in a few months time, some of my difficulties will be solved by updates to some of the programs I have mentioned.

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Confused by all my networks

I admit to testing tools just for the fun of it; so I find myself hovering between a dozen different networks, without much commitment to any of them.  Some of these I treat as news sources.  Facebook is the only one I look for any kind of social connections, but I tend to be stingy about them too.  The problem with this lifestyle of tasting different services is that my networking world becomes distorted in favour of geekdom, a domain to which I don’t really belong.  Some of the services I like best, such as FriendFeed and Twine, have readerships that incline heavily towards technical people.  I am still trying to figure out which of these networks I feel most at home in, and what I want to accomplish there.

I have just read some interesting, if terse, notes that came out of the SXSWi event, Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content” [Louis Gray posted an interesting blog post after this same event:  Finding the Web’s Best Content – Do You Want it New or Trusted ] A panel of experts discussed their methods.  For me, I find a mixture of RSS news feed reading, supplemented by FriendFeed to be the most useful.  If I want to learn more about a subject, or what people are saying, I try a search on socialmention.com.  I don’t have the time or the patience to wade through reams of twitter tweets.

The next question is what to do with all the information I gather.  The first step, I think, is to get it organized in something other than chronology, so for this it makes best sense to use one of the social bookmarking sites – I use Delicious.

There is a serious question about the value of link sharing.  So many people are already sharing, and have greater expertise than me in every field.  I’m a dabbler; I don’t have the time to read everything about all the subjects that interest me, and other people who specialize in each knowledge field, are better at aggregating content for it.  Lately I have been thinking that the best approach may be to gather various stories about a given subject, then contribute towards the conversation by placing the most authoritative articles together in my blog, together with my own thoughts.   Besides mentioning these articles in the text, I will gather the links together prominently, so that readers can go directly to them and not listen to my blather.  In order to preserve a unique voice, I will speak mainly from my own experience.

In the last few days I have begun to reduce my linksharing across various networks.  In order to be efficient, it isn’t sensible to cross-post to various services.  I seem to have gone back to delicious for most of my bookmarking (rather than Twine).  Delicious enables finer control over the placement of the information, and their website also works very fast.  But most people, including me, seem to treat delicious just as a great reservoir of information.  I also want my links to enter a chronological “river of information”.  I like Friendfeed best for this.  I have decided to put into Twitter (using FriendFeed as the lever) only my original material.  On Facebook I have stopped sending all the Friendfeed information to my profile and news feed.  It can be found under the FriendFeed tab of my profile.  When a link seems particularly relevant to my facebook crowd, I can send a link directly to FB.

I have yet to consider the changes that have come to Facebook today (new privacy settings that enable profiles and newsfeeds to become public – see links below) and the other modifications that may change the way that people use Facebook.  But I will leave that to think about that another day.  For now, I have opened up my privacy settings.

Links:

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Scaps from my journal during the mindfulness retreat

Chang How

Chang How

Thursday, March 5

We started a four day retreat with Chang How, a Thich Nhat Hanh disciple, at Khukuk, a kibbutz just above the Sea of Galilee.  We arrived Wednesday lunch time and it will continue till Saturday afternoon.

During the evening meditation I thought again about what Murakami wrote at the prize ceremony in Jerusalem.  I must download the speech, lest it disappears from Haaretz website.  His speech emphasized that every human being has worth and dignity.  Is this dignity based on his Buddha Nature, or is it based on the things that make him unique – the imperfections?  Are the imperfections, the egoism, the flaws of character, also Buddha Nature?  I think that for a writer these are of the essence; the thing that makes a novel interesting.  The dirt – this is the place a novelist goes, and dwells.  But he transforms it into art – he exhalts what other men shun.  He doesn’t belong to that dirt, but rests upon it like a lotus, like a saint.  Of course this is a very idealized view of a novelist.  But in reading writers of the calibre of Murakami or Mistry, there is a feeling that they are special in that way.

Thursday morning.

I was very tired yesterday when we arrived, and tired this morning in meditation. Thoughts confused. I imagined, I think it was early morning, that over Chang How, while she sat talking, giving a dharma talk, there was a high beam, and on it sat a crow.  I was gazing at the crow, which made bird movements, hopping and pecking.   And then at breakfast in the dining hall, I also sat gazing above Chang How’s head (this time in reality).  Behind her hung a photograph from the early days of the kibbutz.  There was the fortress from the 1940s, its tower, stone walls and interior courtyard.    There was a banner saying that you must have the intelligence to know what to want, and then to execute it.

The teacher gave a dharma talk this morning about her own life experiences, which included early life in Vietnam.  She became a refugee and had to move three times, the last time to Canada.  When she fled, it was without any possessions.  She had only two shirts and two pairs of pants, all of which she was wearing.

Chang How was for a long time very angry with her mother.  Her mother had to work hard to support their large family, such that she had little time for the children.  Once when she came home from work the children asked her to take them for a ride on her motor bike, but she was just too tired.  Till today, her mother is full of worry, remembering her earlier hard time and the war.

They had a handicapped brother, who lived with them at home.  Chang How said that while one normally thinks that it is the most beautiful child who gets the most attention, his disability brought all of them to love and help him.

Chang How grew up hating the Americans for what they did in Vietnam, and it took her a long time to overcome this hatred.  Later in Canada she met with war veterans and told the story of how one visited her home.  He had been traumatized by the war and was very distrustful when he came to stay with her.  Before going to bed he secretly checked the whole apartment, crawling from place to place, checking every room.  He even came into her room while she pretended to sleep.  He was afraid she would murder him.

—————–

Satyakama Jabala told his mom that he wanted to study under a vedic teacher and so he needed to ask her about his lineage.  She said, When I was young, I was a maid, and had many relationships.  Therefore I can’t say with any certainty what your lineage may be.  My name is Jabala, so you should say that you are Satyakama Jabala.

Satyakama Jabala went and sought out a vedic teacher and, when the teacher asked him about his lineage, he repeated the story is mother had told him.  The teacher said that only a true Brahmin would have responded like that, without hiding any part of the truth.  He accepted him as his student.

“Om is like a pin, which pierces through all the leaves.”

This morning in meditation I felt like Om must be the string upon which all the beads of a mala are strung.

I fell into a deep sleep after breakfast, with the Upanishads shielding my face from the sunlight. Dorit had been reading aloud the 14 mindfulness trainings, and I had said, “The dharma’s too hard, I’m going back to sleep.” I didn’t awake until 10:30, till long after the “dharma sharing” had begun.

The days, (in the Galilee) are full of birds, “sounds like they are saying words.”

Maybe they are giving their own version of a dharma sharing, if I could understand them.

Da – Datta – Dhamyatta.  I had been looking for that half-remembered passage from What the Thunder Said, in TS Eliot’s The Wasteland.  Quoted from somewhere in the Upanishads, I think.  [found it later: Brhadaaranyaka Upanisad, Chapter 5, 2.] Dorit had been asking if Dana, the donation given to the teacher in Buddhist retreats, is a Sanskrit word.  English, Italian, Pali, Sanskrit – the same.

My Flip camera‘s battery is weakening fast.  This morning I managed to film only till the end of the recitation of the first mindfulness training.  Strange, I dreamed, in my mid-morning slumber, that it had an iphone battery, and was therefore replaceable.  It would be nice if it would be so.

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On news feeds and link sharing

Lately I have tried to become more systematic in the way I use and process the vast amount of information that is available on the web.  I realized some time ago that it isn’t enough to rely on chance and occasional browsing to pick through that information, but to depend on bookmarking and storing of newsfeeds.   One obvious illustration of the necessity of newsfeeds is that most newspapers do not keep yesterday’s news on their homepages.  So if you miss a day, important articles have already been buried.  But by subscribing to the newspaper in an rss reader, the articles are still easy to find a few days later.

Recently I have read articles that advise abandoning newsfeeds and relying on Twitter.  That doesn’t work for me – Twitter is too intense.  But, on the other hand, I have found that Twitter offers a way to serve up its content also through RSS, and that’s a lot better.  By doing a Twitter search on a certain term, I can then store that search in my newsfeed aggregator.  That way, I will never miss a Tweet on that term.  A variation on this is to use the search engine Socialmention, which checks other microblogs and media sources too.

I use Flock browser, with its built in aggregator to collect my newsfeeds.  As with Google Reader and other aggregators, it’s possible to create folders, such as “technology” or “politics”, place the relevant sources in those folders, then see all the stories in a mashed up stream.

I have also been considering, once again, about how best to share links to stories I find interesting.  I want to share them across various networks without making a separate share for each network and, preferably, without duplicating stories.  That means adopting a relay system, and this never works in an optimal way.

Today I decided that old and trustworthy Delicious just might have the best way of doing this.  There are a few advantages.

1. It has a very large user base.
2. Many other services allow import to and export from Delicious.
3. The service happens to be built in to my Flock browser again, allowing synchronization between local and remote bookmarks.
4. Delicious has some neat features: its simple tag organization, the fact that it tells you how many other people have posted links for the same article, and the ability to find other readers interested in the same subjects.

When I post to Delicious, the post is picked up by Facebook, and placed in my news feed.  The same happens with Twitter. Both of these are relayed through FriendFeed.  Delicious also has a feature that collects all links from a certain day and makes a blog post of these.  I will see how this works.  The only odd-man out of my social networking constellation now is Twine – a topic-based network that I very much like.  Twine recently started to allow import of bookmarks to its service, but I haven’t tried this yet.  It would be better still if it permitted import of links via one of the other services, rather than the extra effort of re-linking every story through its browser bookmarklet.

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