Besides the fact that I personally find it much easier and faster to handle PDF files, there are many reasons why it is not a good idea to send off the originals:

• Compatibility: I am running three OSes (OSX, XP, Ubuntu) and have access to most word processors, so it is very seldom that I can’t open a file. But as the number of widespread text file formats have started to increase recently (with the addition of .docx, .odt, .pages to the old-timers .rtf and .doc), I notice that the issue of file format compatibility is starting to become an issue again for many people.
• Accessibility: there is no point in passing away the source material unless you want people to edit it.
• Layout: opening a .docx file in OpenOffice usually always results in a document that looks differently than it was intended in MS Word
• Pictures: I often see that there are problems with embedded pictures, either they may not be there or formatting and image adjustments may be different than what was intended
• Changes: if the “track changes” function was turned on while writing, all changes will be accessible to the reader. This may not always be a big problem, but there are several examples of where this has been a crucial issue.
• Legal: the state regulations in Norway tell that all public documents should be saved as open formats, either .odt or .pdf. This is a fairly new regulation (1 January 2009), so it has not had a full impact yet, but hopefully it will one day.

Take-away message: never pass around your source material unless you specifically want people to change it (which is not the case with a university term paper, nor an official letter on your institution’s letter head…). Use PDF, please.

<code>defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true</code>

ctrl+option+apple+8

Very useful for situations were darkness is better than light (yes, it is winter solstice today).

I just installed Linux Mint on what I thought to be a super-slow windows box, only to notice that it runs super-fast and smooth with Linux. Particularly impressive was that it managed to find all the drivers for sound/video cards, webcam, etc. The entire install of a clean system with everything took less than 30 minutes. I don’t even want to think of how that compares to installing either OSX or Windows and adding everything else (FireFox, OpenOffice, +++). It also nicely installed drivers for my HP LaserJet P1005 printer. However, the problem was that the printer didn’t print. No error messages, the printer showed up, the OS thought it printed, but nothing came out. After a bit fiddling back and forth I found that this is due to some problem with the built-in drivers.

So as a reference to myself, and for everyone else there with the same issue, here is what I did to solve the problem:

• Deleted the old printer in the printer setup window
• Installed the foo2xqx driver using the terminal

$ wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ cd foo2zjs
$ make
$ ./getweb P1005     # Get HP LaserJet P1005 firmware file
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-hotplug
$ sudo make cups

• Installed the printer using the normal printer setup utility. This time it asked whether I wanted to install with the hotplug option. This seems to be important!
• The printer still didn’t work, but I found a discussion where it was suggested to do the following:

$ sudo rm /etc/cups/ssl/server.*<br />$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups start<br />

• Finally, the printer prints!

During my workshop at the summer school, around 30 students tested the programs on their own laptops. This gave me a chance to see how the software behaves on a multitude of different hardware and OS (at least three different versions of OSX, and four versions of Windows). Things worked surprisingly well, but there were some problems in between that I will try to solve in the coming weeks.

All the applications are available from the FourMs software page.

I have been using various Unibrain cameras for years, and have gotten used to the simplicity of being able to hook up multiple cameras to one computer. Last year when I tried hooking up multiple USB-based webcams to a computer (Windows, since they didn’t work on OSX at all), only one could work at a time. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I found that Logitech’s QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac actually works well on OSX, and you can even have several of them running at the same time (see screenshot)! Now the only problem is the auto-focus and auto-contrast which tend to cause problems in video analysis (particularly when doing background subtraction).

There were lots of people interested in the software at the conference, so while in London I spent some time cleaning up code, fixing bugs and rebuilding standalone applications for OSX. I will make Windows builds as well in the coming days. I have made a new fourMs software page where everything can be found.

There are probably lots of things missing, but at least this is a start of making these things accessible outside our group. Please report bugs. You could also suggest improvements, but I am not sure if I will have time to implement them anytime soon.

I recall reading this when I downloaded the latest beta a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think much about it before I opened my MacBook at the Brussels airport last week and saw a “do you want to pay using SkypeOut” message on screen. I often check to see if there are any available networks around airports, but most of the time you have to pay some ridiculous amount of money for connecting in a few hours (in Europe that is, in the US I have come across many airports that provide WiFi for free). However, most of the time I only need to access the internet for a few minutes to send and receive e-mails and check a few things online. Well, now I was connected to the WiFi in Brussels airport for 1 minute and 50 seconds, and paid only NOK 1,25 per minute. Great!

I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use. I have been a Unix/linux users for years at the university, but have given up every time I tried to install it on any of my personal computers. Ubuntu is the first distro that actually managed to install without any problems, and which also managed to detect most of the hardware by itself, at least enough to actually work on the system.

Before I started the process on installing Ubuntu on my MacBook aluminum, I had heard rumors about it being a non-straightforward process, but it turned out to be very simple. I used bootcamp to install Windows XP (remember to format the drive using the windows installer, otherwise it won’t boot up…). To my surprise the new Ubuntu 8.10 installer made it possible to install Ubuntu from within Windows, and without needing to repartition anything. Quite a lot of things are autodetected, and there is a community page that suggests how to fix the rest. The built in audio support is not impressive, but an external sound card will hopefully work fine.

I didn’t find any good recommendations for how much hard drive space I should allocate for XP and Ubuntu, and what type of partitions to use. Previously I have had a 20GB NTSF XP partition, and that seemed sufficient, although I couldn’t read and write to the drive from OSX (apparently there are some software solutions for this). To be more flexible in my tri-OS-life, I decided to go for a 32GB FAT32 partition, of which I set aside 15GB for Ubuntu. After all necessary software is installed, mainly Max/MSP on XP and various Linux audio applications on Ubuntu, there are a 3-4 GB available on each system. This should be sufficient as long as I am mainly going to use the two OSes for occasional software testing.