In a word: Moof.

All new entries are now being posted to Fantastic Pancakes.

I can't imagine I'm the only person who has grown tired of hearing that phrase repeated constantly. It implies the most ridiculous analogy "militant atheism" and "militant Islam". Every day we hear of "militant Islamic" groups attacking, bombing, and killing (for reasons most American's don't understand and don't really care to understand). But when was the last time one of these "militant atheists" tried to intentionally harm others, much less kill and slaughter in the name of their godlessness? Doesn't it seem odd to use the same word in both these cases?

Interestingly, the last time the phrase "militant Christian" was used in the New York Times was 1997, and before then in 1993. These uses referred to abortion clinic bombings, and unquestionably used the word "militant" in the violent sense. Atheists, it seems, become "militant" simply by writing a book.

Ulysses is a long book. It takes about a year to read, at least when you're trying to take classes, work, and read a few shorter books in between. But it's not at all a bad way to spend that much time.

It's been said by too many intelligent people that "The only reason one reads Ulysses is to say they're reading Ulysses." I think this comment is outrageously disparaging of the nature of literature itself. It would be no different if it were "The only reason one reads Shakespeare is to say they're reading Shakespeare", or Dickens, or Melville, or any other major author. It suggests that these authors are no better than any other random writer, and that one only reads their works for the pretentiousness. This argument is completely ignorant of the fact that these "great writers" are so named because their works are better than the vast majority of English literature! These authors wrote ambitious, innovative, rich books, and they have been read and enjoyed by countless people. They would never have lasted out of their sheer pretentiousness, or the efforts of some secret literary-cabal, or any reason other than their own merits as works of art.

So ignore these pedantic criticisms, and read Ulysses for whatever reason you want. It's difficult and it's long, but with some effort it is readable and quite enjoyable. Just remember that, as Vladamir Nabokov put it, "the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense". And lots of time.

The story of my experiences with the ADS Medialink left off in my last post with an excellent solution for streaming music with a 100 line ruby script. The problem remained, though, of how to stream video. The Medialink didn't like straight avi's served from the Webrick server, and casualy presents the most unhelpful error messages ("Out of memory") when you attempt to watch a movie this way. Seeing no obvious reason for why this would be, I kept searching for more information on the device.

It turns out that the ADS Medialink is outstandingly obscure, and is barely mentioned on its manufacturer's website at all. But in my search I came across a number of similar devices which all seemed to have the same features and this "Syabas middleware". This, apparently, is the software that runs on the Medialink and many other similar devices. Syabas created this software with fairly complex capabilities, and left manufacturing the actual devices to a handful of electronics companies. A somewhat odd strategy I must say, and certainly the cause of much of my confusion when trying to find information on the software, but once you realized that all these devices are the same they become much easier to deal with.

So with this issue sorted out, it becomes fairly clear that all I needed was software that supports these Syabas-middleware based devices. The first one of these I found for Linux was called wizd, so I pulled it from cvs (they don't seem to have actual releases put together), fixed a few build problems, and let it run. Streamed a movie to my TV just perfectly. Now if only the computer in my room at school was running, so I could download a movie from it to watch ...

In yet another example of the compulsive buying habits of my roommates and I, we recently obtained an ADS Medialink off off woot.com. This device was designed exactly for students at Case. The Medialink plugs into your TV, connects to the wireless network (using 802.11g no less), and allows you to view movies and listen to mp3's from any other computer on the network. The video plays remarkably well for being streamed over wireless, and it plays every divx or xvid movie that I've tried. This device could not be better designed for the needs of college students. Now there's no need to haul a laptop out to the common room and hook up cables to the TV just to watch a downloaded movie, and no Ipod required to listen to music in the common room either. And it doesn't even need an ethernet cable!

The biggest problem with the Medialink (other than the extremely buggy software on the device) is the software that runs on the computers serving media files. Of course the device didn't come with any software for Linux, so I had to explore the Windows software to devise a solution for Linux. When I first looked at it, I was amazed at how simple the software was. It just started a web server, and the Medialink receiver used a web browser to connect to it. The entire user interface was done in HTML. Even more surprising was that the server software was just a Apache Tomcat with a mess of Java server pages. It's a simple, and not entirely bad idea. So I figured I could duplicate it pretty easily.

My first attempt to create some solution for Linux was to install tomcat on my laptop, and copy the jsp code over directly from the windows version. This resulted in failure, since I quickly became tired of tomcat crashing on startup without any clear error message. I removed Tomcat, and tried just using straight Apache. This also was not successful, since I could not customize the directory listing pages as easily as I liked. I didn't want to resort to PHP for this project, and that seemed to be the only solution on apache.

So I looked elsewhere. The best solution I found was the WEBrick server built-in to Ruby. It was amazingly simple make it serve mp3 files, and only slightly more complex to subclass the server and create custom directory listings. The result is under 100 lines of code, and it is faster and more reliable than the software that comes with the device. Here is the code. I still need to figure out how to stream video files to the Medialink box, but that shouldn't be significantly different than music. Other than that, it's quite usable.

I know there are already several entries on planet.case.edu regarding the "Case Daily" email, but I thought I'd offer my comments just for completeness.

Case Daily is primarily an news aggregator. It combine all sorts of diverse sources of Case-related information into one spot. Although the goal of Case daily was to eliminate frequent campus-wide emails, the resulting monolithic newsletter is in many ways more problematic. It combines useful information with unwanted information in way that makes it difficult to separate the two. By throwing the wheat in with the chaff, Case daily provides an almost unusable means of transmitting information to case-campus@case.edu.

For instance: looking back at all the emails that went to case-campus this semester, the messages I care about include "Talk by Ken Miller", "Invitation to the Case Concert Celebration", "Closing of the PBL building", and anything from protective services. The messages I don't care about include "Bookstore Spring Rush Hours", "Holiday Safety Reminders", and "Authorship Guidelines". Now, the glory of email is that I can easily sort through all these messages, disregard the ones that don't matter to me, and read only the messages that I find important. More significantly, anyone else is free to pick a different set of messages that's important to them, and only read those. Nobody is forced to read about holiday safety if they don't wish to.

Case daily prevents such selectivity by combining all campus-wide information into one monolithic email. I can either spend three minutes reading all of it, or I can unsubscribe and never read anything. Neither of these are acceptable. I want to choose what interests me and what doesn't. I don't want to read "For Faculty/Staff" or some headline from The Chronicle of Higher Education, but I do want to read "For Students". This used to be easy, I just never read The Chronicle of Higher Education and deleted any email geared toward faculty. Now I have to hunt for the student-related information amidst news of the new director of donations (Not to offend Kathy Robinson, of course).

I admit that the authors of the Case daily have tried to make it easiy to parse with the use of headlines and bold key phrases. This is a Good Thing. But email was designed to help people sort through large volumes of diverse sorts of information quickly; why should we circumvent this with a daily newsletter?

Back home; and, in general, bored.

Spent too much time milling about with the relations yesterday. The food wasn't worth it. Came home, slept for 10 hours or so. These are the first two nights I've been able to go to bed before 11 in months.

Ugh. So boring here without my roommates'. I might head up to Toledo later tonight; maybe entertainment will be found there.

So everyone's seen the posters everywhere advertising TV on your computer. Well, I can't get that with my linux box (of course), so I spent some time looking into it.

When you select one of the channels on my.case.edu, you get sent to a (useless redirect and then) a nsc file. This is cisco's shittily encrypted means of pointing a client to a stream. I messed with it a bit, and finagled the actual streams out of these .nsc files. But there's no bloody way I can get anything to display the video on linux, because it's WMV3/9 (two different numbering schemes). So until someone can come up with a reliable wmv9 decoder, OSTN is still useless with linux. Oh, and interesting thing to note: 129.5.109.55 is a Rensselaer IP. Another IP mentioned in the file is 233.127.154.14, which is some multicast IP.

I've been fighting this too long. I need to calm down with some strawberry fig newtons.

Anyways, the URL's are below the fold. I strongly encourage further hax0ring.