Tuxi’s Blog

During President Obama’s inaugural address, President Obama stated

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers … our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

This, in my opinion, squares nicely with the Ben Franklin quote at the top of the page, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security.” I have a fervent hope that we indeed return to the rule of law. We’ve had too much in the way of arguably illegal detentions (e.g., Guantanamo) and allegedly illegal wiretaps. Both of these actions undermine the freedoms all American armed forces fight/fought for.

Here’s wishing President Obama and our nation the best as we collectively continuing moving forward.

I bought an Epson Perfection V300 a few weeks ago because it appeared to be usable in Linux with VueScan. When I tried to get it to run I had no luck. The driver for the scanner was supposed to be at AVASYS.

Finally, on the 19th of December, AVASYS indicated that a driver existed for the V300. I downloaded the .deb files for 64-bit Ubuntu, but the iscan .deb file wouldn’t install because libltdl3 was required by the driver and libltdl7 was what was provided by Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I downloaded the necessary libltdl7-dev and other dependencies and compiled iscan. I installed it with checkinstall so I could use the package manager to uninstall it or upgrade it. However, it still didn’t work. I even tried it in 32-bit mode on another machine without luck.

I found a link from the AVASYS message board to this Ubuntu Forums thread. I removed the iscan and firmware files, installed the libltdl3 package from Ubuntu Hardy (8.04), and installed the iscan and driver from the .deb files. Voila! a working scanner! .

I’ve been busy scanning in slides and some negatives at 4800 dpi. Talk about a happy camper.

As I’ve said before, I am an alumnus of the University of Oklahoma. Despite that, I intend for this post to be non-partisan.

There has been much ado about the Big XII tiebreaker which put OU into the Big XII title game and now into the BCS championship game. Let’s look at the tiebreakers in order

1. The records of the three teams will be compared against each other — round robin losses among the three teams means this tiebreaker is inconclusive.
2. The records of the three teams will be compared within their division — with the round robin nature of the losses, the division records of all three teams is identical making this inconclusive.
3. The records of the three teams will be compared against the next highest placed teams in their division in order of fi nish (4, 5 and 6) — all three teams beat the remaining three teams in the division making this inconclusive.
4. The records of the three teams will be compared against all common conference opponents — round robin losses were the only losses; therefore all three teams defeated all common opponents making this inconclusive.
5. The highest ranked team in the first Bowl Championship Series Poll following the completion of Big 12 regular season conference play shall be the representative — this is the tie-breaker which sent OU to the Big XII title game.
6. The team with the best overall winning percentage [excluding exempted games] shall be the representative — this would have been inconclusive had it been in effect.
7. The representative will be chosen by draw — obviously this can’t be examined without the draw taking place

Mack Brown has suggested that a replacement tiebreaker should be to compare the highest two ranked teams head-to-head match up, which would have given UT the nod. If I were a Texas Tech supporter, I would have taken umbrage at my team’s victory being ignored.

Other tiebreakers which could be considered are:

1. Round Robin (three teams only)
   • Points Allowed
   • Points Scored
   • Point Differential
2. Division
   • Points Allowed
   • Points Scored
   • Point Differential
3. Common Opponents (Division plus KU)
   • Points Allowed
   • Points Scored
   • Point Differential

I’ve prepared a spreadsheet (OpenDocument format) which shows the summary of the the above tiebreakers. UT wins the points allowed tiebreaker for the division and common opponents. OU wins the points allowed tiebreaker for the round robin and all the other tiebreakers.

Of course, there would be no discussion of tiebreakers if OU had beaten UT, UT had beaten TT, or TT had beaten OU. Failing to win out head-to-head caused the need to look at tiebreakers. All three teams knew the rules prior to the season (they were released 31st July 2008). I wouldn’t be surprised if the Big XII didn’t revise the tiebreakers for 2009.

Linux Journal had an article (subscription to the print version may be required) entitled, “Over-the-Air Digital TV with Linux” in their July 08 print issue. After reading the article, I thought I’d get one of the reviewed USB tuners and play with it. This post provides info (some from the article) which I think is valuable.

The tuner I got was Pinnacle’s PCTV HD Pro Stick. The article let me know that I would have to do the following actions (was written using Ubuntu 7.10, but works on 8.04):

First get all the build tools needed (I had all but mercurial already)

sudo aptitude install mercurial build-essential linux-source

Next get the firmware for USB tuner cards

sudo wget -q http://konstantin.filtschew.de/v4l-firmware/firmware_v4.tgz -O /usr/local/src/firmware_v4.tgz

Unpack the firmware into /lib/firmware

sudo tar xzf /usr/local/src/firmware_v4.tgz -C /lib/firmware

Grab the latest copy of the V4L DVB source code from mcentral.de:

cd /usr/local/src
sudo hg clone http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/v4l-dvb-kernel

Compile the V4L drivers:

cd /usr/local/src/v4l-dvb-kernel
sudo make
sudo make install

The next step was missing, and that is:

sudo modprobe em2880-dvb

This loads the kernel module needed for the tuner. When I plugged in the USB tuner without this module installed, the keyboard locked up and I had to reboot (happened on a desktop & a laptop).

The program I landed on for tuning digital TV is Me TV. This is a simple program that uses xine on the backend. I didn’t need the bells and whistles of MythTV, which is what was discussed most in the LJ article. A program to use the analog channels is tvtime, and I used this to check out that the card was working before I found Me TV.

When you are satisfied that the usb tuner is working well, you might want to make the module load every time the machine boots. To do this add

em2880-dvb

to /etc/modules.

On the Seattle Post Intelligencer blogs there is this post which states that the “NBC Olympics on the Go” will only be available to Windows Vista users. (ars technica has more information here.)

This just goes to show how powerful the Monoply is and also how stupid someone at NBC is. MS is trying to force their unwanted OS on users, and I can understand that motive. NBC, however, must be stupid to believe that there will be any significant market penetration for the “on the Go” service.

It’s obvious that I, as a Linux user, will not be able to use the service. However, there are three Windows boxes which I administer in my house which will also not be able to use the service! (You can also add my work Windows machine to increase the insult to users.)

Had NBC not thrown in with MS on this but had used Flash instead, all my machines would have been able to view content. Shame on you NBC!