Volt édesanyámnak egy régi orsós magnója, amit egyszer megtaláltam az egyik beépített szekrényben. Lehettem olyan egyszámjegyű éves talán. Persze utána nem lehetett tőlem elvenni, sőt megkaptam a hozzá való szalagokat is. Este világítottak benne az elektroncsövek.
Anya, mint minden tipikus magnós fiatal, a rádióból vett fel számokat. Ezek egyike volt F.R. David 1982-es slágere, a "Words". Én már gyerekként is olyan süket voltam, mint most, és meg voltam győződve, hogy a dal szövege így hangzott: "birds don't come easy to me". Képtelen voltam felfogni, mit akarhat ezzel mondani a szerző. (Madarakat etetne?) Amúgy erről a számról beszélek:
Ez az egész words - birds dolog csak azért aktuális, mert a Twitterről lesz szó.
Egészen röviden a Twitter egy ún. mikroblog szolgáltatás, ahol a felhasználók 140 karakteres üzeneteket szabadíthatnak a világra. A csiripelők (ez lett a "twitterer" magyar fordítása) feliratkozhatnak egymás üzeneteire, sőt akár mobilkészülékekre is kaphatnak SMS-értesítést ezekről. Én körülbelül 2008 januárja óta vagyok regisztrálva.
Nos, ha az ember túllép azon, hogy iwiw üzenőfalként használja a csiripet, egészen hasznosítható forrássá is válhat. Például kiválóan lehet eseményeket követni, legyen az egy Formula 1 GP vagy a díszmagyarok újabb közterület-rongáló dzsemborija a belvárosban. Az immáron a siteba beépített keresővel pillanatok alatt tisztába kerülhetünk vele, mi az ami a világot éppen foglalkoztatja. E sorok írásakor a sertésinfluenza és az X-Men: Wolverine fej-fej mellett haladnak.
(Igen, tudom, néhány sztár accountja mögött tuti, hogy egy PR-os üldögél.)
Nem utolsósorban pedig igen könnyen taláhat az ember a szakmájába/érdeklődésébe vágó twitterezőket. Zenészektől (Trent Reznor) a Game Designerekig (Ragnar Tørnquist), hardcore WoW guildektől (Ensidia) magáig a nagy Googleig bezárólag a választék korlátlan. Plusz előny, hogy pár jól megválasztott követővel nagy az esély, hogy bármiylen kérdésére gyorsan és hatékonyan választ kaphat az egyszeri twitterező.
Jó vadászatot tehát. Adott esetben engem is lehet követni a twitter.com/sesam címen.
Of course, hilarious as it is, this is by no means an attempt by Blizzard to poke fun at a potentially deadly disease. This spell has been in game since the first beta version of WotLK came out about a year ago. Besides, there has been Swine Flu cases in humans as early as 1976.
Whenever I feel down the first thing to notice is the lack of updates here. However much I like writing it’s still work: putting down ideas in a semi-coherent way is a challenge in itself in addition to the time needed to properly research the topic, find or create some images, etc. When the mundane household tasks paired with the brainwashing classes wear me down to an intellectual numbness the last thing I have the energy for is blogging.
Then there’s the fact that wherever I look more talented people produce better quality posts with finer style and better quality content. Usually all of my posts start with me mentally scribbling down a lingering idea. Sometimes I set to put it down at once but more often I just try to hold on to it till the next time I have time to write an entry. Browser tabs containing concepts for writing later usually amount to half the tabs open as well. But then as time passes and I keep researching and pondering more often than not I end up deciding against writing anything considering the uselessness of the attempt to add anything relatively new to the topic.
Basically I have too much time to spend in my head. I suspect a lot more blogging ideas would actually make it to reality if I spent less time meditating and more time writing. However since I live alone and only go to classes and grocery shopping all I have is time to think to myself.
A couple of minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced: all four defendants (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Carl Lundström) were found guilty in ‘assisting in making copyright content available’ and received a 1 year jail term each as well as a shared fine of $3.6M.
The verdict is not final, both sides are allowed to appeal to the high court. It is important to mention that the verdict applies to these four individuals, The Pirate Bay website and organisation is not affected. Even though the judge also stated, that:
"the usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay is illegal"
Which in itself quite shocking. And so are the possibilities if this verdict becomes a precedent for future trials.
Apparently the copyright holder lobby is still going strong and their ambiguous reasoning to enforce copyrights seemingly holds up even in a court of law. If anything this decision slows down the evolution of alternative rights management models and preserves the industry of dinosaurs a while longer.
Mint minden tavasszal eddig, idén is egy szem kohai érkezett kis hazánkból az ötéves undegrad program keretében. Hozzám hasonlóan Vale is Tokyoban végzi a japántanulmányait. Ami érdekes lehet az ország iránt érdeklődőknek, hogy ő is blogol, méghozzá irigylésre méltó rendszerességgel. Ráadásul a bejegyzéseinek többsége magyar nyelvű.
Én is visszaolvasgattam néhány akkori írásom. Sajnos nekünk még kicsit nehezebb volt kommunikálni, hiszen nem volt a szobákban internet, csak a könyvtárat vehettük igénybe. Elég szórakoztató és ijesztő is egyben, mennyi butaságot tudtam összehordani. Viszont megnyugtató, hogy ugyan pár év eltelt ottlétem óta, a JLC-élmény még mindig nagyjából változatlan: én is hasonlókról számoltam be öt éve.
De most komolyan, ezt kellene (különösen 4:55-től) lejátszani mindenkinek kötelezően ének-zene órán. Nem Hull a szilvát énekeltetni a szerencsétlen fahangúakkal. Kodály módszer my ass. Gilmour módszer!
I went to get something for dinner and only when I was halfway home did I realise that I was still carrying the store's plastic basket. Thinking back, the time from the cashier to realisation was mostly lost. One of these days I'll dreamwalk right under and 18-wheeler.
A lot of people replied to my 'State of SeSam address' for which I am thankful. I completely agree with most of the comments, especially since I too think that staying home wouldn't have been necessarily better. In fact, if I look back, the reason why I even tried and accepted the scholarship back then was my need to be different. I don't think of myself as the person who'd be satisfied with doing the same thing the majority of his peers do. I don't mean it in the cliché be yourself way, more like I dread being boring and ordinary.
Had I stayed home and finished university there I'd probably be complaining about my dull life, my nine to five job and the horrendous payments on my mortgage. And I'd be convinced that I wasted my good years without doing anything interesting.
I fondly remember the moment when I watched The Family Stone and I realised that everything Meredith was saying about her time in Hong Kong I experienced. I knew all the locations she mentioned. And also - unlike Everett, who confessed his regret about never getting around to it - I shared meal with the monks in their uphill monastery. I could have missed all that.
(I'd swear I already wrote about this but none of the keywords resulted in any hits in the archives. Should I be repeating myself, please accept my sincerest apologies. My brain is getting old.)
On the other hand, who am I kidding. There is nothing special about studying abroad, not even in Japan. I also can't think of anything I can do better than anyone else. Much as I like to brag about it the only time I've been outside Japan was the aforementioned trip to HK. And no matter how much I tinker with computers I don't think I qualify for being a geek even. So what should I be proud of?
It's all ambivalent. I can't decide if I really am the worthy person I like to think myself to be or it's all just deluded arrogance and I embarrass myself by even hinting it.
Anyway, I don't think I'm alone with my view of the country though. Just this week I bumped into two kohais on my way home. We talked about being in Japan. They said the exact same things I usually bring up: complained about the impossibility of making friends with the Japanese, the lack of understanding, the latent inhospitality. One of them expressed his wish of transferring to Osaka due to the more foreigner-friendly credit point system. Seemingly the really comfortable scholarship cannot counterbalance the instilled depression. 'I wouldn't mind staying for Master's if life here was any good.' I was told.
I admit I'm not the most tolerant and open of all people, but I'm not just making up the Japan I write about.
As for my last couple of months I don't think I will have too many opportunities. Without the steady influx of scholarship I'll probably have to restrict my expenses to (cheap) food. That removes any chance of travel unless I walk or ride the bicycle. As a fail-safe plan I am taking boatloads of classes so even if I end up failing a bunch I'd still gather enough credits to graduate. Which means even less free time than I used to have. The area is also teeming with native speakers of English who are all per definitionem more desirable for a teaching job than me.
To finish the title, I'd burn this whole building down.
Update 1: Added nss-mdns service and runlevel defaults.
For a while now I've been battling with the router my ISP gave me. In the name of user-friendliness it has a Japanese administration interface with a lot of katakana for the IT terms. More importantly it simply doesn't offer IP issuance over DHCP based on MAC addresses. Which means with the linux box and the MacBook switched on and off randomly they'd get completely different IP addresses and I have nothing to prevent that.
(The MAC Address Filtering only works if the wireless extension is installed, not with wired LAN.)
Now that started being a major nuisance after I shared everything via NFS. OS X can connect to NFS shares with the Command+K "Connect to Server..." option in Finder but it needs the IP address of the machine. I also set up the NFS server to accept connections only from the IP of the MacBook - I don't like open doors - but then that had to be changed as well every time the bloody machines swapped IPs after a restart.
Not too sophisticated.
It recently occurred to me that there must be some implementation of the zero configuration networking technology of Apple called Bonjour. The idea behind this is that no matter what their IP is machines broadcast the services they offer and find each other on the network without any user interaction whatsoever.
A prime example is when there are two Macs on a network and you set up file sharing on one of them in matter of seconds it will pop up at the "Shared" section of the other's Finder. With Leopard this feature has been extended so Windows machines are recognised automatically as well. When I visited home upon connecting to the LAN the public shares of all the Windows PCs in our house appeared almost instantly. After supplying the usernames and passwords of the respective computers I could browse the files without configuring anything. (You need to set up Samba - well not as much set up more like tick a checkbox in the System Preferences - if you want Windows computers to see Mac shares over the network.)
I think we can all agree that the zeroconf approach is pretty cool. But what if you have a linux box?
Surprisingly it didn't take long at all to figure out a solution. I wonder why I didn't do it earlier to be honest. Here's how it should go on a Gentoo box:
Step 1, Set up netatalk, the open source implementation of AFP, Apple's file sharing protocol. After emerging it needs a few tweaks. In /etc/netatalk/netatalk.conf some protocols are better switched off.
Then proceed on configuring the shares. They can be added at /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default but I just went with the default sharing of the home folder.
With the following command add the netatalk daemon to the default runlevel (so it autostarts every time with the machine) and start it.
Step 2, Configure Avahi, the open source replacement of Bonjour (zero configuration networking). AFP shares is one thing but if you want them to pop in Finder without any hassle you need Bonjour to advertise their presence on the network. Apple has its own source code available for linux but I found mDNSResponder vastly inferior to Avahi. (i.e. I had no idea how it worked...)
Avahi needs a config file at /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service to contain the following:
The txt-record entry specifies the type of machine OS X will think your share is on. This will result in OS X machines to display your linux box with a nice Xserve icon. Undefined shares get an Apple monitor icon or a Windows CRT with BSOD on it as far as I know.
Update 1: In order to be able to use machine names instead of IP addresses from the linux box you will need to emerge the nss-mdns package too. In /etc/nssswitch.conf find the line starting with hosts: and add mdns to the end of the line. Mine looks like this now:
hosts: files dns mdns
Finally add to the default runlevel and start Avahi as well.
Step 3, profit. That's all to it because after starting Avahi an icon for the linux box will appear in matters of seconds in Finder. Press Shift-Command-K to go directly to the Networks location and wait for your server there. When it pops a double click will result in a can't connect error but don't panic. Just use the "Connect As..." button and specify your linux username and password. Congratulations, you can now browse the linux server as if it was any other Mac on the network.
If you want to use more types of services the Gentoo Wiki page on Avahi can help with the configurations. If you'd like to use the linux server as a Time Machine backup location Matthias Kertschmann's guide explains that as well. My post is based upon his guide except I changed the file locations to their Gentoo equivalents.
It is important to mention that if you run any firewalls on the machines they need to be disabled or adjusted to work with Bonjour/AFP. This mainly means you have to allow communications over port 548 and 5353.
