{"id":1228,"date":"2010-04-30T13:16:10","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T17:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2010-04-30T13:16:42","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T17:16:42","slug":"odd-lots-111","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1228","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>Well, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.channelregister.co.uk\/2010\/04\/30\/ubuntu_10_04_review\/\">Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is out there<\/a>, but I had other committments yesterday and couldn&#8217;t download it on Day One. This may have been a good thing; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.co.uk\/news\/desktop-os\/2010\/04\/30\/ubuntu-dev-team-zap-last-minute-bug-to-release-lucid-lynx-40088824\/\">there was a last-minute bootloader bug that interefered with dual-booting with Windows<\/a>. Still, I&#8217;ll be installing it on one machine or another ASAP and will report here.<\/li>\n<li>Tom&#8217;s Hardware posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/reviews\/linux-open-office-lotus-symphony,2565.html\">a solid comparison of Linux office apps<\/a> yesterday, and if you&#8217;re considering Linux for day-to-day work, it&#8217;s worth a close read.<\/li>\n<li>I got the <a href=\"http:\/\/audiveris.kenai.com\/\">Audiveris<\/a> sheet music OCR app installed the other night, and it does work&#8211;however, it requires 300 DPI sheet music scans in order to operate, and none of the ragtime sheet music I found online was anything close to that high-resolution. (I tested it using high-res example scans installed with the app.) As with most Java apps, it is agonizingly slow: It took <em>seven seconds<\/em> to pop up a simple Save As dialog, on a 3.2 GHz SX270 with 1 GB RAM. I also had trouble getting audio output via its MIDI support; however, after saving the generated MIDI to a disk file, the MIDI file played normally through several different player apps.<\/li>\n<li>Rich Rostrom did send me a link to another composition by Irene Giblin, the author of the Ketchup Rag: The Chicken Chowder Rag. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=MWu6OUivY4k&amp;feature=related\">a video of an ancient record playing it<\/a>, and another (far better) video of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=FOCFzPaUe4I&amp;feature=watch_response\">a piano roll of the song playing on a player piano<\/a>. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grainger.de\/music\/composers\/giblin.html\">a short bio of the long-lived composer<\/a>&#8230;and (finally) a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grainger.de\/music\/midi\/rmketchup.mid\">MIDI file of the Ketchup Rag itself<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>ZDNet posted <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.zdnet.com\/perlow\/?p=12719&amp;tag=nl.e550\">one of the better ebook reader evaluations I&#8217;ve seen lately<\/a>, and while it appears to be Kindle vs. iPad, it&#8217;s really e-ink vs. backlit LCD. I&#8217;m currently with LCD. I don&#8217;t read outside for many reasons, including a lack of comfortable chairs out there, and a feeling that if I&#8217;m outside I should be walking or climbing or digging or something.<\/li>\n<li>Making large numbers of books portable is what the ebook thing is all about. Here&#8217;s another approach: <a href=\"http:\/\/davidgarciastudio.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/archive-series.html\">Climb inside your circular bookshelf and start walking<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Of course there&#8217;s lots of 2010 still ahead of us, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spc.noaa.gov\/climo\/online\/monthly\/newm.html\">charts from the NOAA<\/a> indicate that severe weather in the first four months of the year has fallen to what looks like a ten-year low.<\/li>\n<li>The post was 23 days late, but better late than never: <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/insolence\/2010\/04\/fear_the_homeopathic_bomb.php\">Fear the homeopathic bomb!<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is out there, but I had other committments yesterday and couldn&#8217;t download it on Day One. This may have been a good thing; there was a last-minute bootloader bug that interefered with dual-booting with Windows. Still, I&#8217;ll be installing it on one machine or another ASAP and will report here. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[17,15,43,59,49,14],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-linux","tag-music","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1229,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}