Present Perfect

My latest Amazon order arrived at work. One of the books was the Doolittle book in the 33 1/3 series. For those who don't know, this series dissects an album track by track and tells stories about the recording. The first one I read was on Afghan Whigs's "Gentlemen", for obvious reasons.

These books tend to be a little top-heavy, saying less about the band and more about the reviewer, and they can be hit-and-miss because a lot depends on the actual writer/journalist. It seems the band remembers little about making the album. Two things stick after reading this one:

• Apparently I'm as prone to mishearing lyrics as anyone else. This book tells me that the first lines of La La Love You are "Shake your butt / Not too hard". All my life I've been hearing that as "Take the bus! Not the car!" Somehow I'm going to keep preferring mine, although I have to admit shake your butt makes more sense in the context of the song.
• If you' re doing a 100+ page book on Doolittle, how on earth do you manage to not talk at all about the hidden mini-album in Doolittle that you get when you play the tracks as numbered in the CD booklet ? Gouge away/Mr. Grieves/Dead/Wave of Mutilation/Tame/Hey/I Bleed/Monkey gone to Heaven tell a very different story than the main album. If there's one question I'd ask mr. Thompson about Doolittle, it would have been about this one...

The book was written before the recent Doolittle tour, as it mentions Silver has never been played live by the band. Which I'm going to assume was correct before that tour since I have no bootleg evidence to the contrary...

My latest Amazon order arrived at work. One of the books was the Doolittle book in the 33 1/3 series. For those who don't know, this series dissects an album...

I've seen other people blog about it as well, so I shouldn't stay behind - obviously it's noteworthy.

In a good seven hours, our platform will be streaming a talk by the eminent Mr. Lessig from Harvard. Apparently the stream is going to be projected in various locations around the world as well where people will gather to follow the speech. While we're only the technological medium and hence a small piece in making this possible, it still makes me proud to be part of this chain. It's moments like these participating in a chain of openness that make me think business and technology can be used for the greater good.

For more info, see our blog. I'll be tuning in after landing in Brussels at midnight tonight!

I've seen other people blog about it as well, so I shouldn't stay behind - obviously it's noteworthy. In a good seven hours, our platform will be streaming a talk...

Today I ran into a weird problem on my N900. I was clearing some space to put on more music, and to do so I wanted to delete some root images I had on the device.

I had used qchroot to mount each of them to decide whether I could delete them or not. The combination of mount, qchroot and closechroot however seem to have some issues; I'm not 100% convinced closechroot actually properly cleans up. It seems to do so, but running mount after it shows most chroot mounts still active, although you can't actually access them or unmount them by hand.

Anyway, I unmounted them as best as I could, and deleted 3 of them, for a total of 8 GB. However, the disk space wasn't actually freed. Deleting other files worked fine and reclaimed disk space as expected.

I rebooted, thinking that there probably were active references to the blocks, but this didn't fix anything either.

I started digging around for possibly hidden Trash folders, and someone on #maemo suggested that there should be a /home/user/MyDocs/.Trash-1000 but it wasn't there on my device.

Eventually, I found about dosfsck, which is installed on the device, and it said something hopeful:

Reclaimed 109128 unused clusters (7151812608 bytes).
Free cluster summary wrong (5274 vs. really 114402)
1) Correct
2) Don't correct

and after some fiddling to actually make it apply the changes, it dropped the following files in my MyDocs:

FSCK0000.REC
FSCK0001.REC
FSCK0002.REC

They were all about the same size as the images from before, so I deleted these files and voila!

Since I didn't find anything pointing to this using Google, I'm posting it here so that I can find it next time, as well as others that may need it..

Today I ran into a weird problem on my N900. I was clearing some space to put on more music, and to do so I wanted to delete some root...

Suddenly it's upon me. Packing my bags for eight days of snowboarding in the French alps. It came so unexpected this year.

Found a description of off-piste runs on the net, should come in handy.

I'll be sure to visit this particular spot in La Vallée Perdue that I snapped with my phone last year:

Suddenly it's upon me. Packing my bags for eight days of snowboarding in the French alps. It came so unexpected this year. Found a description of off-piste runs on the...

Linux Magazine March 2010 is full of GStreamer goodness: one article reviewing 4 media players, all of them using GStreamer (Banshee, Rhythmbox, Amarok 2, Songbird), and a three page article on your favourite video editor, PiTiVi!

Linux Magazine March 2010 is full of GStreamer goodness: one article reviewing 4 media players, all of them using GStreamer (Banshee, Rhythmbox, Amarok 2, Songbird), and a three page article...