My YouTube Channel

Earlier today, in examining my Google portfolio, I discovered I had a YouTube channel, with one video. However, YouTube wouldn't show me the video, until I verified my account. Upon doing so, YouTube promptly deleted my video.

I have no idea what the 14 minute video, entitled "reasons_to_reject_win7" contains.

Slightly more annoying, is that there is no indication of that video, when I log into YouTube on my desktop, but it was displayed when I logged in on my phone.
 

Core Software

A core set of 25 programs will cover 80% of the needs/requirements of the typical computer user, in either an office, or a home setting.

Core software:
* Text editor;
* Calculator;
* File Manager;

* Word Processor;
* Spreadsheet program;
* Presentation program;

* Database engine;
* Database client;

* Graphics display program;
* Audio display program;
* Video display program;

* Graphics editor;
* Audio editor;
* Video editor;

* IRC client;
* IM client;
* VOIP client;
* VP client;
* FTP client;
* P2P client;


* Web browser;
* Email client;

* Contact manager;
* Calendar program;

* eBook reader: ePub, PDF, LIT, Mobi, etc.

96% of the software requirements of the typical user, be it in the office or in the home, can be met with a repository of roughly 500 programs.

MX Linux

In the middle of December, frustrated by the umpteenth system crash that day, I wiped Xubuntu from my laptop. At the beginning of 2016, I used Linux Mint, dropping it, when I got tired of multiple system crashes per day.

Given the error messages I've seen from both Xubuntu, and Mint, my conclusion was that SystemD was responsible for the crashes.

Thus, my requirements are:

* Does not use SystemD;
* XFCE Desktop;


Going to DistroWatch, I noticed that MX-Linux 16 had been released a few days earlier, and that it met my primary requirements.  I installed it, then started using my laptop.  With increasing trepidation, I used my computer as I normally did.  Individual programs (^1) crashed, but when they did so, they didn't take the OS down with them.  I kept waiting for the OS to crash.  It finally crashed, when I opened an extremely resource hungry program so many times, that neither Swap Memory nor RAM was available.


Other than not crashing, the biggest difference between MX-Linux and Xubuntu is that a right mouse click on the desktop has several options that require root. LibreOffice 5.3 stores palettes in /opt/LibreOffice/share/palettes, making the ability to open Thunar as root, from the desktop, extremely useful.

Something else I've noticed, is that Thunderbird isn't playing games, claiming that folders are not available, and requiring me to click on the error message, to deliver the email to the inbox, and then clicking on ">Tools >Run Message Filters." With half a dozen emails per day, that is barely tolerable.  With three to five emails per minute, that is completely unacceptable.




For more information about MX-Linux, go to https://mxlinux.org/.



In all, I'm much happier with MX-Linux, than I was either either Linux Mint, or Xubuntu, a month after installing them.


^1: I tend to use beta versions, rather than stable versions of software.  As such, program crashes are not unexpected.

According to Translate.Google.Com

The following paragraph is written in English, according to Google Translate.


Добро пожаловать на страницу проекта Templet - облачного сервиса параллельных вычислений Самарского государственного аэрокосмического университета!
Templet – это шаблон, лекало, модель для построения параллельных программ. Работа сервиса Templet основана на следующих принципах: 


 Here is a screenshot of the page I was looking at.

Here is the screenshot of what Google Translate displays, when requesting the translation:  URL  http://templet.ssau.ru/.

And here is how Bing translates that page.

Not that I like Microsoft, but if their stuff translates pages that Google won't.

Um, Really?!?!?!

ISO 639-3 lists 7,776 languages.

Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten) claims that of their currently listed 7,105 living languages, 3,570 have a developed writing system, and 698 are unwritten, with no knowledge about the writing system, if any, of the remaining 2,839 languages.

SIL lists 451 languages as having died in the last millennium, and 116 languages as having died more than a millennium ago. Inasmuch as primary consideration is given to languages that have been reduced to writing, it probably is a gross underestimate of the number of languages that are either dead, or extinct.

The most recent UBS Translation Report I've found, is from 2007.  As of 31 December 2007,  the Bible (Protestant Canon) had been completely translated into 438 languages. The Bible had been either completely, or partially translated into 2,454 languages.

Wycliffe Global Alliance, which is arguably the largest organization translating the Bible, claims that as of 1 October 2014, the Bible (Protestant Canon) had been completely translated into 531 languages.  The Bible has been completely, or partially translated into 2,883 languages. Furthermore, there is active translation work in 2,195 languages.

ISO 15924 lists 199 writing systems, of which 35 are not included in the Unicode Standard.

The breakup of the Iron Curtain validated Max Weinrich's maxim: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

By defining one IETF Language Tag, as one language, one might be able to avoid the dialect/language difference, and the language/writing system difference. By way of example:

• TUR-Latn-TR;
• TUR-Arab-TR;
• TUR-Cyrl-TR;

Those tags are for the same language (Turkish), used in the same country (Turkey), using the Latin Writing System, The Arabic Writing System, and the Cyrillic Writing System, respectively.

And that is how Windows 8.1 claims to support almost 7,000 languages.

A11Y Tools

Earlier today, I got to thinking about devices for those with A11Y requirements.

Speech2Text4Keyboard Input

• Voice input;
• Listen to voice;
• Convert to text;
• Send text to system as if a keyboard;

ASL2Text4Keyboard Input

• Video input;
• Watches video for ASL;
• Convert to text;
• Send text to system as if a keyboard;

Text2ASL4Video Display

• Screen reader reads console input;
• That input is broken into words;
• "Known" words are displayed as a person talking, using ASL;
• "Unknown" words are displayed as a person spelling words out in ASL;
• "Query Mode" can be enabled, to add more "known" words;

Eyes2Keyboard Input

• Video Camera watches;
• Eye Movements are converted to Dasher images;
• Dasher sends text to system, as if a keyboard;

Touchscreen Reader/Presser

• Video Camera watches;
• OCR software watches video input;
• OCR software outputs text;
• Screen reader reads text;

• Voice input;
• Listen to voice;
• Convert to instructions;
• Camera guides the prong in moving to the selected item;
• Prong on device extends out to press the selected item;

Additions to the Hardware

• 10 Key Keypad;
• Joystick;
• Firing button;
• Trackball;
• Camera;

These would be used if the vocabulary could not differentiate between a keyboard value, and something to be written.

Or maybe just to be used as supplemental aids;

• Bluetooth;

Make it a Bluetooth enabled keyboard.

Existing Software

• Sphinx3: voice recognition;
• Dasher: predictive text input;
• Eyegazer: eye-tracking;
• Orca: screen reading;

Needed Software

• ASL2Text: This examines photographs for ASL signs, and outputs the corresponding word;
• Text2ASL: This displays a picture of a person making the appropriate ASL gesture;
• Prong Guidance Software: This is the hard one. I suspect that there is code from a robotics project that can be converted/modified/re-used, that will do this. Worst case scenario is to write the dumb pigeon scenario;

Platform

This is the type of one-off job, that Arduino's were designed for.

Devuan

There is a new startup Linux distro in town:
Devuan.

https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

The theory is that it is Debian, but without SytemD.

The people behind it are still working on what infrastructure is needed, before development can start.

So what is the topic that has the greatest discussion?
Release Names.

A few people are trying to determine what hardware is needed, and where to locate it.
A few more are trying to decide what should be included.

In retrospect, what they greybeards should have done, and perhaps are doing, is create a public list that they all but ignore, and a private list for discussing infrastructure, and what the distro will include.

Then, when the beta release is ready, announce it, and go fully public.

Mobile Device Patents

Since the SCOTUS ruled on Bilski v Kappos back on 28 June 2010, it seems that that the mobile device market is under attack by patent trolls.

The microserf that uses the moniker Paul Allen has had his pet patent troll file a lawsuit about his non-patents. (How much did Paul Allen bribe the USPTO to award those patents? There is no way that they could have been otherwise awarded, because they are so obvious.)
Those patents:

• No. 6,263,507, "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data."
• No. 6,034,652, "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."
• No. 6,788,314, "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."
• No. 6,757,682, "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."

Interview Questions

I'm not sure how I wandered into the article in Forbes There are Only Three True Job Interview Questions. That isn't a new insight. What Color Is Your Parachute listed them back around 1980.
What caught my eye was a reader's comment

I think these questions are irrelevant in the context that if a company is ASKING YOU if you can do your job this assumes that they WANT you to do your job otherwise why are they asking you to be hired.

There are companies where HR is divorced from the rest of the organization.
One memorable example is the company that hired a system admin, and then fired them, as soon as they learned that the new sysadmin was working on a AA (Systems Management) at the local community college.  Before the individual was hired, the company knew that the idividual:

• Had no formal training in the field;
• Had plans to obtain formal training;
• Had taught themselves everything they knew about systems
  administration;

When the company found out that the individual was enrolled in classes related to AA (Systems Administration), they were fired. Attending those classes violated the unofficial company policy.
That is a clear cut case of management, and corporate policy preventing employees from doing their job correctly. In most instances, it is far less obvious:

• Redoing the corporate intranet, but not ensuring that those changes meet BSI BS 8878:2010, the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992, the US Section 504, etc
• Distributing official policy changes that are neither copy-edited,nor proof read:
• The changes describe the method that was not to be followed, as if it was the correct way to do the thing;
• Omitting the dress code for female staff. The whole point of distributing the dress code, was due to complaints about women wearing inappropriate attire;
• Failing to provide the tools required to do the job properly:
• I'm not talking about construction, where the crafts person is expected to have their own tools, and even then, most job sites contain a toolbox that can be used when a worker doesn't have the right tools for the job;
  
• I am talking about things like the company that required the skip tracer to go online, but provided neither Internet access, nor a computer to do so;
• Providing the wrong tools for the job:
• An example being the sandwich shop that expected employees to cut cheese slices three millimeters thick, but provided a blunt cheese knife, and no slicer;
• City Directories, CrissCross Directories, and Reverse Directories that are more than five years old;
• Not taking complaints about sexual harassment seriously:
• How many employees realize that even if the activity is not directed at them personally, they can submit a sexual harassment report?
• Punishing the individual that files the sexual harassment report; 

I do not how much of those behaviours can be picked up during an interview with HR. These are things that a good due diligence background report on the company should pick up on.

There are some companies who use DMCA take down notices, SLAPPS, and the like, to prevent damaging information about them to become publicly known.  The major examples are vendors of guaranteed flopportunities.

Traffic Sources: Search terms.

On one of my other blogs, I was looking at the search terms that generated the most hits.

In position # 6 is "topp twins untouchble girls bit torrent".

Untouchable Girls is a documentary about the Topp Twins.  None of the posts on my other blog mention either those folk singers, or the documentary.  Dionysus the Twin is the closest that blog gets to mentioning twins.  In one post, I do discuss torrents as a means of sharing files amongst users. 

LiberOffice

Back in October, a couple of developers, and community leaders in OpenOffice.org formed a new organization, and created LibreOffice.

They had a plan, but not a very well developed one. They had some ideas, but nothing laid out in concrete. The whole effort felt as if it had been drawn up on a Friday, implemented on a Saturday, and announced on Monday.

Two months later, and people are still wondering what it will offer. Or what it won't offer.

One of the issues raging on the LibreOffice mailing lists is whether or not LibO should be able to save, or export to OOXML, or, more precisely, the variant called DocX by Microsoft, and is allegedly the native file format of Microsoft Office.

The philosophically pure approach would be to neither read, nor write any file format implemented by Microsoft.

More statistical wierdness

I started a new blog in February.  I have not given the URL to anybody.  The only publicity I've done, is to casually mention that I would be blogging about that subject matter. 

Today I casually look at the stats for that site, and low and behold:

• The most hits are from Iran;
• The biggest traffic generator is a site in Singapore;

Whilst it is nice to know where the traffic comes from, the statistical data provides nothing that explains the source of the traffic.

Say what?

I was looking at the stats for this blog.

The most common keyword search for this site is:
shop to earn compensation plan.

That implies that my posts about Mary Kay, and Shop To Earn http://plainsofninsianna.blogspot.com/2008/07/shop-to-earn.html are what gets people here.

However, my post about Thunderbird is the one that has the most views.

This is not from "All Time", where older posts might reasonably be expected to have more views than newer posts.  This is from last month's stats. OTOH, I haven't been posting much to this blog recently.

A Media Centre

I setup a Linux Box to use as a media centre.
Then bought a big screen TV for it.

Problem: The TV does not have a VGA port for the computer.

Solution # 1: Buy an Android tablet with an HDMI out. Use VLC to stream content from the Linux Box media centre. Watch content on the big screen TV.

Solution # 2: Buy an Android tablet and NSA. Connect the two together. Watch content on the big screen TV.

The real irony is that Android Gingerbread is a better server than Microsoft's Home Media Server 2011 is. (Fewer bugs, and more out of the box functionality.)

Coming soon to a tablet near you: AAMP.

AAMP := Android + Apache + MySQL + Python/PERL/PHP.

Obama Care

I've been reading through the ObamaCare bill.

A couple of things to note:
* It makes homelessness a criminal offense;
* It reduces the amount of health care coverage offered by employers as a fringe benefit;
* It raises insurance premiums for everybody, whilst reducing the amount of coverage;

All that the kenyan citizen that occupies the white house is doing, is replaying the mau-mau revolution in the united states.

eSnips

Once upon a time, roughly five years ago, esnips was worth attempting to use.
But now, as this screenshot shows, it requires one to login, even when one is already logged in.



If you look at the top right hand part of the picture, the sign out link is clearly visible.
Next to it, is an equally clear "My Menu" link.

The login stuff is equally visible on the left hand side.

I call that a fail.

64 bit video

Flash is A11Y hostile, and as such, web designers who use it should be required to have both arms, both legs, both ears, and both eyes removed before being allowed to design another website.

But there is another problem with flash as well. It is not cross-platform. Flash is stuck in a 32 bit world. A world that died in the previous century. Technology that is more than a decade out of date. The only people that use 32 bit operating systems are people that run virii that masquarade as trojans that masquerade as operating systems.


The image below is of the page at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html.



Which is why FLOCK, a so-called social browser, fails to cut it as a social experience:



Whilst Minefield almost passes that test:



As does Namoroka:



Epiphany doesn't have any issues:



Galeon displays the same error message as firefox:



It is hardly surprising that Konqueror exhibits the same failure to display flash:



And for those of you who want to torture your ears, listening to what to has to have been one the worst songs to ever come out of Bulawayo, it can be found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWDAPFU19GI .

Thunderbird

Today, I concluded that there is no way that I can accept Thunderbird as having anything that even remotely resembles an email client.

It is, at best, a toy for people who never receive email. A category that I am not in.

A pity, because that means that there are no email clients for Linux that use a GUI.

Thunderbird bugs

Way back in 2006 I filed a bug report for Thunderbird using the mozilla bugzilla.

Today it was closed due to insufficient information.
What they wanted was a copy of the logs that Thunderbird generates.

Between the fact that I turn Thunderbird logging off, and that my workaround consists of either doing everything sequentially, or using different email clients to retrieve email, I did not have the logs they requested.

I was under the impression that the bug report was closed years ago, as "will not fix". One of the developers told me that the described scenario is outside of the design specifications for Thunderbird. As such, Thunderbird is not a suitable email client for me, and the patch I requested is not suitable for including in Thunderbird.

I am at a complete loss as to how having log files --- any log files --- would help them code the requested patch. Especially since the parameters are provided in the original bug report.

And people wonder why I don't recommend Thunderbird, on the basis that it does not retrieve email.

Thunderbird 3.1

In installed Thunderbird 3.1 yesterday.

Bad idea. Very bad idea.
The default is to retrieve email via IMAP, not POP3.
Yuck.
The only good thing is that I didn't install it on my main system.

I'm not sure what I'll use, when I migrate to Ubuntu 10.10