All of my real blogging activities have been moved to:

tonybaldwin.me/blog

Although I may post here from time to time while testing work/new code in No comments:

Preview of Xpostulate Improvements

A preview of what's to come...


Thinking of UI enhancements, I added the Xpostulate little icon thingy right into the GUI.






What do you think?


Recently support has been added for Friendika, and other improvements have been made. I mentioned them elsewhere, but neglected to post to this blog. Support was removed for iziblog and inksome.net (both are non-existent now), and scribbd (spam haven). Support was added for custom wordpress installations.



Other items on their way:

• Posterous support. I have interacted with the posterous api via bash with curl, so, just need to translate my scripting for that to tcl with http. Cake, but requires time. I thought I would have that done this past week, but, no joy...too much work (somebody's gotta pay the rent around here).
  
• Blogger support. - The great and benevolent Google® has granted me an API key, and I have looked at the API, but not yet played with it, but this is likely to come this season...soon, me dro0gies.


• Read your statusnet public timeline or updates from a specific person. This I have, again, done in bash, so just a matter of coding it into tcl. Although, I question if this is appropriate for Xpostulate, and whether it might not be better to do this with iDenTickles only, since iDenTickles is a microblogging client, and Xpostulate is intended for crossposting to blogs, not reading others' updates.


• Download, edit, & republish older entries. This is on my todo list, but for each blogging service I have to look at how their API handles this, and then code stuff in, and develop new GUI elements for housing various functions, and blah, blah, blah. It will be work..heavy lifting...but it's on my TODO list.

---

posted with Xpostulate

Fault Lines: The Top 1%

The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it's been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US' 14.3 trillion dollar debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above 9%, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programs that are the backbone of the US's social safety net, and whether to raise taxes — or to cut them further.

The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the United States has never seemed so divided — both politically and economically.

How did the gap grow so wide, and so quickly? And how are the convictions, campaign contributions and charitable donations of the top 1% impacting the other 99% of Americans? Fault Lines investigates the gap between the rich and the rest.

This episode of Fault Lines first aired on Al Jazeera English on August 2, 2011 at 0930 GMT.

Luisa Maitas - Lero Lero

via YouTube - Luisa Maita - Lero-Lero.

No mp3brasil.com estão oferecendo o mp3 gratis, em troca por um tweet (A @luisamaita é destaque na @radiompbfm e pra comemorar eu baixei uma música em troca de um tweet! http://bit.ly/hpZsof). Pois, dessa forma fiquei sabendo dessa garota lindinha e talentosa, e fui buscando mais músicas dela. Valeu, sim!


Se você gostar, pode comprar o disco inteiro Lero-Lero

ou ainda melhor, pode baixar todos os mp3s por somente US$5.00: Lero-Lero (Amazon Exclusive Version) (vem com um remix extra somente disponível no amazon!)

Comprei os mp3 dessa forma, e estou gostando demais!

In mp3brasil.com today they are giving a free download of this song, in exchange for a tweet. Thus, I learned of this beautiful and talented girl, and went in search of more of her music. It was definitely worth it!

Follow this link to get the mp3 for yourself: http://bit.ly/hpZsof

If you like it, you can get the CD for $13 here: Lero-Lero

or, even better, download the entire mp3 album for only $5 here: Lero-Lero (Amazon Exclusive Version) (comes with an extra remix song ONLY available on Amazon!)

I bought the mp3s, and I am LOVING it!

---

Okay, desde que eu estava aqui de tarde escrevendo, eu tenho que dizer que NÃO POSSO PARAR DE ESCUTAR ESSA MENINA!
Eu tive que sair de casa, pois, fiz um disco das suas músicas pra levar no carro, E, também pois as suas canções no meu celular (android), e, fico escutando, de novo e de novo, sem cansar dessas músicas. Tem elementos folcloricos e de músicas tradicionais brasileiras, mas, também algo bem moderno, que nem posso describir, e, que ela tem influencias em outros artistas brasileir@s já e obvio (Céu, Marisa, Bebel, Adriana e muitos que llegaram bem antes) mas, ela tem criado algo bem distinto, ainda. Além de tudo, essas músicas possuem uma beleza cativante que me deixam louco pra ouvir-as de novo.
Você TEM que escutar esse disco. Eu juro.

Okay, since I was here this afternoon writing, I have to say that I CAN NOT STOP LISTENING TO THIS GIRL!
I had to go out, so, I burnt a disc of her music to take in the car, AND, I also put her songs on my cell phone (android), and I keep listening, over and over, without tiring of these songs. They have elements of folk and traditional Brazilian music, but, also, something quite modern,that I can't quite describe, and, that she's been influenced by other Brazilian artists (Céu, Marisa, Bebel, Adriana and many other who came before her) is quite obvious, yet, she's made something all her own and original. Above all, these songs possess a captivating, hauting beauty to them that makes me crazy to hear them again.
I swear, you have GOT to listen to this disc.

:)
./tony

Adventures with Debian on AMD64

Well, folks, I figured it was time for a computer upgrade, since, I was, until yesterday, still working on a 3.2ghz Celeron CPU with 1.5gm ram that I purchased almost 4 years ago, now, from TigerDirect.com. Frankly, that machine was still doing a great job on 95% of stuff I do. I can't lie. But, being the geek that I am, I felt the need for more speed, and whole lot of putrid green envy over newer, shinier things. So, I went to my favorite source, again, TigerDirect, and ordered a 2.5ghz dual core, AMD64 barebones kit with 4gb of ram.

d00d...I have not been able to ramp up the CPU usage past like 18%, nor use more than about 20% of the ram. I know there are bigger, faster machines out there, but this is clearly plenty of machine for my needs.

Anyway, this machine is an AMD 64 bit CPU. I won't pretend, for even a second, to comprehend what the difference is between 64 bit and 32 bit computer, beyond that 64 is twice 32, and, in some cases, it means I need different software.

So, I got the machine in two boxes, with all these separate parts, a motherboard, a cpu, 2 ram sticks, a hard drive, and I had to put them together. I yanked the video card from my old machine and used it, too, since it has dvi, and this mobo in this kit did not (works best for my monitor). And, then, being completely ignorant, as I am, I installed from the same Debian/Lenny XFCE installation disk that I had used for every other machine in my office. It installed okay, but, for the life of me, I could not get DHCP to work so I could connect to the internet. So I got on #debian at freenode with my old computer (now using an older monitor, and the onboard mobo video) and raised my hand and after several rounds of the real hackers in there massaging me with the Socratic method, it became clear that I had simply installed the wrong system, and that I needed the (duh!) AMD64 version of Lenny. So, I downloaded that ISO file, burnt up a CDROM, and installed it. And that worked nicely, and the DHCP works fine, and I'm actually writing to you from this new machine. I like it. But I had a few other adventures between then and now, and thought I'd share them.

One of the first things we all do is tweak up our browsers and import our bookmarks and all the good stuff. Well, I prefer google chrome, which makes a lot of that really, really easy, since you can synch all that stuff right online, so, of course, I installed google-chrome, which I'm using now, and, surprise, I like it. But, flash was not working...which made me sad. I did a lot of googling around and digging around and trying to figure out why, and, along the way even tried iceweasel (debian for "firefox") and found that flash wasn't working there, either. Eventually I found Adobe Flash Square, the new 64 bit, beta, prerelease, Flash plugin. Now, getting that to work with iceweasel/firefox was simple enough; Simply a matter of downloading the tarball, unpacking that, and copying the libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Did that, and I could watch a youtube video in iceweasel, no problem. But there is no plugins directory for google-chrome. More googling about revealed that the browser, supposedly, has Flash support built right in. Sure. But it wasn't working... A bit more googling about and I learned that I could see more information about my plugins in google chrome by pointing my browser to about:plugins, and, so, I did, and I learned that flash was, in fact, not really built into chrome, but that chrome was looking in /usr/lib/swfdec-mozilla/ for nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so, which was, indeed, there, but not working. I learned that this nswrapper nonsense was an older trick, which, apparently, is not compatible with the NEW Flash 10, or something, because, well, I figured that out because it wasn't working...But the Flash Square libflashplayer.so WAS working...So, this is what I did: I removed the nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so, just yanked it right out of /usr/lib/swfdec-mozilla/. Then, I made a link in that directory to the libflashplayer.so in /usr/mozilla/plugins, and renamed it to nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so (since that's what chrome would be looking for), and restarted chrome, and, guess what. IT WORKED!

cd /usr/lib/swfdec-mozilla/

su

********

rm -f nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/swfdec-mozilla/

mv libflashplayer.so nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

That did it.

Now, that's not the only issue I've had. I installed LibreOffice, for which there are 64 bit .deb files. But when I tried to run it, it kept puking and giving up. I looked at the error it was giving. I neglected to write it down, but, it comes down to the fact that it could not find libcairo.so.2. I dug around for that, and found it right in (big surprise) /usr./lib....so, what was the problem? I looked again at the error. For some reason unknown to me or anyone with whom I've communicated, libreoffice was looking for libcairo.so.2 in /opt/libreoffice/basis3.3/program, rather than in /usr/lib, where any normal program would expect to find such a lib. That was easy. I just copied the lib right in there (I don't know, I probably could have symlinked that, too...didn't even try that...).

cp /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 /opt/libreoffice/basis3.3/program/

And that was that. LibreOffice is now working superbly. Since then, I've realized I could have also either, a) symlinked (ln -s) that library, or just yanked it, so LO would be forced to look in /usr/lib.

There have been a few other tweaks and adjustments along the way, but, at this juncture, I've got a blazing fast system (debian with openbox is light and efficient) on which to work. Good stuff. I feel like a got a great deal from TigerDirect, and, as always the best deal ever with Debian gnu/linux. The guys on #debian at freenode were extremely patient and graciously helpful, and I owe them a great debt of gratitude. Debian ROCKS! both the software and the community.

---

On a side note, stealing my old machine's video card (Celeron 32.g 1.5mb ram, x86 arch), and the 24 inch 1680x1050 monitor, seemed to have pissed it off, because, with the onboard video and 15 inch 1280x960 monitor (both of which it HAD used before I purchased the big screen) all text in gui windows, menus, panels, etc. was

HUGE

too huge to read, even, where windows were expanded off screen and even alt-click grabbing them and moving them around was useless, and menus were unreadable, and, basically, all graphical elements were rendered useless, regardless of whether I used openbox, lxde, xfce, or wmii...I wrestled with that for hours...running Xorg -configure, dpgk-reconfigure xserver-xorg, xrandr, changing screen resolution, refresh rates...sacrificing chickens, and my best goat...blah blah blah..all to no avail.

Eventually, I figure out that the problem had nothing to do with Xorg, screen resolution, or what type of sacrifice I offered...The culprit was gdm (still don't know why). I figured it, because, if I logged into single user as root and started X without the assistance of gdm, everything was perfect. So that seemed, correctly, to identify gdm as the culprit. Still, I could not figure out how to fix gdm, so, I just yanked gdm right off the machine (aptitude remove gdm). Using startx from the command line kept starting LXDE on that machine, however, which displeased me since, well, I prefer plain old openbox, without LXDE, and, besides, I also have XFCE and WMII on that machine, and would prefer to have a choice when logging in. So, for that, I just had to copy a .xinitrc into my /home. I removed the entry for LXDE (never use it), and added entries for openbox, xfce and wmii. Now, no DM...I log in via the console, then startx, which tosses up a dialog and asks which of the 3 window managers I want to use, and, good to go. It works nicely.

---

One more really cool thing. I back up my /home regularly onto an external usb hdd (at least monthly, but I did it before building the new machine and stealing the video card from the old one, I do :~# rsync -rvu /home/tony /media/disk/home), so, I was able to simply copy my whole home directory onto the new machines, and, this being the very same system (well, except being amd64 in stead of 32bitIntel, or whatever), all the programs have the same configs, saved passwords, blah blah blah that they had before. That makes moving to a new computer so much easier. Since I run rsync as root, I do have to chown everything (chown -R tony:tony) again after moving it back, but that's no big deal. Except, some program configs from the x86 machine CAN interfere with AMD64 programs (I had to remove the libreoffice configs from the x86 machine).

DjVu: viable, Free alternative to PDF? convert .txt to .djvu

First, a bit of ranting about open standards and free file formats:
Okay, you know I'm always harping about using Open Document Formats.
So, on the LibreOffice user list today there was discussion of a viable Free/Open alternative to .pdf files. After all, PDF is, indeed, a proprietary format, owned by Adobe, and it is ubiquitous, and there really should (must, perhaps), be a free, open alternative. As such, someone on the list mentioned DjVu, which, frankly, I'd never looked at before (I had heard of it, but knew not what it was). It's a free/open file format that was initially created for scanned documents, from what I gather, and has been around since the late 80s, still maintained by the original authors, and is now used for all kinds of gro0vy stuff.
I did a bit of research, googling, apt=cache searching, and poking around. Eventually, I aptitude installed djview4 and djvulibre and experimented a little. I have drawn the conclusion that, yes, in my opinion, DjVu would be an excellent candidate to be used as, in fact, a better option for many reasons, for the purposes .pdf currently serves (a portable document format that preserves formatting, essentially). Works great.

But there IS a rather glaring drawback...
The one big drawback is, conversion tools are lacking.
One can not, for instance, simply write a DjVu file in any kind of document editor, as you can write a pdf with many different editors, web browsers, most office software, LaTeX editors, and basic text editors, such as tcltext, and, frankly, even in a command line interface.
But to create DjVu, you can only convert other files to DjVu.
Then, in general, and this is what most irritates me, it seems you have to convert from non-free formats. There are no tools, for instance, to convert directly from plain text, LaTeX (.tex), .odf (.odt), .png, or even html files to a .dvju file. What's worse, is that all of your Free and/or open source browsers, document editors, etc., will export or print a file to .pdf, but not to .djvu. OpenOffice.org will write a .pdf. LibreOffice, and Abiword will write a .pdf. LaTeX editors will write a .pdf....Everybody will write a .pdf, but nobody has written code to write a file directly to .djvu. In my opinion, that needs changing. We need to use open standards and free/open file formats (all kinds of reasons for that discussed in this entry to this blog).

That said, today I wrote a script to convert a plain text file to DjVu (but, yes, I had to round-trip it through .pdf, darn it).
This script was written on a Debian/Stable (lenny at the time of this writing) system, on AMD64 arch, using all tools available in the lenny repos.
It requires (obvious when you read the script) enscript, ps2pdf, and pdf2djvu (part of dvjulibre).
The script first converts your text file to postscript with enscript, the from postscript to pdf, with, surprise, ps2pdf, and, then, the final step of converting to .djvu.

The script looks like this:
#!/bin/bash

if [[ $(echo $*) ]]; then
text="$*"
else
echo "try again, and include a file name, and ONLY 1 file name at a time. Thank you." && exit
fi

echo converting $text to $text.ps

enscript $text -q -B -p $text.ps

echo converting $text.ps to $text.pdf

ps2pdf $text.ps

echo converting $text.pdf to $text.djvu

pdf2djvu $text.pdf -o $text.djvu

echo renaming ...

rename.ul .txt.djvu .djvu $text.djvu

echo cleaning up ...

rm $text.ps $text.pdf

echo done

exit

I actually turned the script on itself, and created a DjVu file of this text, available here.

With this, I may very add the capacity to export a .djvu file to tcltext. Why not? It's just a shame, imho, that such an export is not direct, without having the cross into proprietary territory via .pdf, in order to be accomplished.

Also, as a gift to my fellow freedom fighters, foss hackers, and open standards supports, I have created a DjVu of my poetry here which contains all the poems published in my recent book (but not the paintings and photographs).

And, this full article in djvu format here. This last was fun, because I ended up having to change the text encoding first. Apparently enscript doesn't like utf8. I had copy/pasted the article into tcltext, which generates utf8 here (system default). I made a .dvju that had all these weird character substitutions (like /200a#blahblah for a quotation mark?). Here's how to handle the conversion.

iconv iconv -f utf8 --to-code=ascii//TRANSLIT yourfile > newfile

Now, if you use firefox or some other mozilla derivative, there's actually a plugin for view such files in your browser, included in the djvulibre packages.. Otherwise, you'll need a djvu viewer, such as djview or evince.

Anyway,
Enjoy.

./tony

LOVE146: END CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING

CHILD – SEX – TRAFFICKING.

These three words should never be used in the same sentence, let alone be a reality. But for millions of the world’s most vulnerable citizens these words define their childhood descent into sexual slavery.

Love146 is a non-profit international human rights organization that is dedicated to the abolition of child sex slavery and exploitation through prevention and aftercare. The industry of human trafficking, and specifically child sex trafficking, is the second largest illegal money-making industry in the world, second only to drug trafficking. Human trafficking will soon surpass drug trafficking, as drugs can be used only once; but children in sexual slavery and exploitation perhaps 15 times a day. Every day. For years. But there is hope. My hope for you is to be as inspired by these children as I have been.

There are currently around 14 million trafficked worldwide, some as young as three years old, many forced into sexual slavery. Unicef estimates 1.2 million additional children are trafficked every year. That is 2 every minute. They must endure an unimaginable fate. They are the currency in a brutal trade, sex trafficking.

Intervention is imperative. We must achieve no less than the ABOLITION of child sex trafficking. This is modern-day slavery on a scale never before seen in human history. You may wonder how so many children are trafficked. The tactics of traffickers are varied and creative. Some children are kidnapped, others are promised good jobs in far away cities, and others are knowingly sold to these traffickers due to extreme poverty. Where there is poverty, there is opportunity for trafficking. And where there is a demand for the exploitation of these children by predators, there is a market to traffickers. These children become mere commodities.

But this is not just a problem for others, far removed from our borders. Child sex trafficking is not just taking place in Russia, India, Latin America and South East Asia, it is happening worldwide on an epidemic scale, including here in the United States. Martin Luther King once wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. This is happening in our own back yard, down the street from our houses, within our communities. These slaves are trafficked into our country for exploitation here. They are sold through our classified ads in local papers, on websites and online communities right under our very noses. This is not just “someone else’s problem”. We are
compelled as human beings to take responsibility for these children and to fight with all our power to restore their childhoods, their lives and their potential.

What do we do about the issue? LOVE146 works alongside organizations who physically rescue these children. But these organizations have a huge problem – they could rescue literally thousands more children from brothels right now, today, but there are virtually no safe aftercare facilities in which to place them nor trained caregivers to restore them. These children cannot be liberated from bondage only to end up at risk of starvation, homelessness, or being re-trafficked and re-exploited. So - at this very moment, children in brothels around the world could be set free if additional safehomes and trained caregivers existed.

This is Love146’s mission - To work toward the abolition of child sex trafficking and exploitation through prevention and aftercare. LOVE146 trains aftercare workers, multiplies safehomes, aids socioeconomic development programs in high-risk communities and provides a voice for these survivors of modern-day slavery. The trafficking and rape of children for profit is one of the darkest stories on the planet. This physical, mental and emotional trauma leaves children broken and scarred for life. Intervention for these children are critical to their survival. Without safehomes and trained care-givers this cannot happen. This is why Love146 exists.

Try to convey the sensitivity of the issue while explaining that this situation needs urgent attention. Love146 understands how vast this issue is, but we also believe there is real hope. Child sex slavery can and must be abolished, not just diminished. Tell the story of a child who has been rescued out of sex slavery and is now healthy (you can visit our website for stories). Connecting to statistics is difficult, but people can connect with an individual’s story. Inspiration and awareness will lead to action; action will lead to abolition and restoration.

Love146 understands how vast this issue is, but we also believe there is real hope.

Child sex slavery can and must be abolished, not just diminished.

Learn more here