Critical Exponent

I am a Linux guy. I have a computer that works well. I tweak it and customize it easily. I look under the hood and change things. I can understand how it works. If I need more functionality, I get new software for free, or write my own. Hell, I can even give it back to the community. Like the beater car that greasy-jeaned high-school student is always working on, my computing solution is always a work in progress.

But now I’ve been given an in with the cool kids. Two weeks ago, Knox gave me an iPhone. It is sleek and elegant; the UI is a marvel (go Apple!). Now I, too, can carry this latest status symbol and oh-so-nonchalantly check the Internet on the bus. Now I, too, can pass for the sexy hipster in the Mac commercials.

I feel out of my element.

I don’t like ostentation and, frankly, I’m often not an early adopter: I just don’t have time to mess around with everything so that it works to my satisfaction. My Linux setup is enough; everything else, I’ll use once other people figure out how to make it work.

The phone itself will be useful, of course. You can use it as a phone or a music player, you can track your location in real time and get directions, check the weather or the stocks, email chat take pictures write notes—many things you could do on a real computer though not quite as well but that is alright because you’re on the go and that’s the price you pay for portability, right?

Sure… but what if you’re not productive or hip enough because your phone doesn’t do x, y, or z? Like the rich kids at school, you just throw Daddy’s money at the problem. You can buy and download “Apps” for iPhone right from the device, most for well under $10 (and, in fairness, many of them are free). That in itself is just so weird to me, that the basic software you need to be productive would be proprietary.

Peeking under the hood? Forget about it. You can’t mount the iPhone under Linux; you need to be running iTunes or some other Apple software in order for your computer to recognize the device and access the filesystem. In fact, that is the only way to change the iTunes account the iPhone uses to buy apps. It is also the only way to sync your music or contacts. Hello, Apple? I feel like a second-rate member of your clique.

Making your own software? Just let the mechanics handle that: while the SDK is available for free, developers must pony up $99 to join the Developer Program where they can actually access documentation and be permitted to upload applications to a real iPhone, and then apply to be permitted to sell the apps in the country club App Store. Sure, $99 may not be a lot to someone with the means to get an iPhone in the first place, but it’s an additional disincentive to make the device “yours”, as is the mere existence of an approval process (to say nothing of the backlog) that prevents you from sharing your apps with others as you see fit. For goodness sake, tinkering and sharing were crucial in reaching our technological state!

There is a future for smart phones like the iPhone, no question about it. I’ll spend some time making this my own (do I need to jailbreak it? ugh), and I am excited that this is moving me even more into the Cloud. (I’ve been resisting the Cloud because it wasn’t quite ready for my needs, but it’s getting there.) I can’t wait for the Android phones, though, which will be open source. When they’re ripe, my Mac hubby can get the iPhone and I’ll go back among the nerds where I belong.

The New York Times on the history of user innovation (a.k.a hacking):

The most successful incubators of user innovation, researchers say, combine fairly large numbers of users and a technology that has a modular or open design. Those design characteristics create a common workbench, or technology platform, for user innovators to tinker with and build on, whether Web software or an “accidental platform” like the Model T, noted Marco Iansiti, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

The idea of creating modular platforms that allow users to synthesize more functionality is certainly familiar from Unix design principles. It is interesting to reflect how the idea existed before the silicon age (and arguably, could have been prevalent before the proliferation of ready-made products that characterizes post-WWII America).

We’ll put up posts on the wedding as soon as we can write coherently about it and we sort through all the pictures.

In the meantime, read critics’ reviews: Nerd’s Eye View, Wolftone, and Vain.

Let’s just say it was a gorgeous, moving event.

(On a lighter note, For Better or for Worse captures some of the angst of actually planning the event. So glad that’s behind us now!)

Wedding season is upon us. Knox’s parents drove up a few weeks ago. Our first guests arrived on Sunday for their pre-wedding Northwest vacation. Knox’s sister and her family are in town.

The logistics are sufficiently under control. We had a spa day on Sunday and I have a much-needed haircut tomorrow before more out-of-towners arrive. Then it’ll be hiking, fireworks, and vows.

Oh, right, vows. I thought we were forgetting something….

Our marriage is less than a month away. Life feels full, as we try to juggle wedding tasks (the meeting of the parents went well), errands we want to get done beforehand (the picket fence is still an abstraction), and relaxation (hah!)

Obviously, I have marriage on the brain, but it seems like I’m not the only one. The New York Times has a retrospective on four years of gay marriage in Massachusetts, complete with a multimedia feature. Then, same-sex marriages are held up as examples of more equitable and non-gender-based power dynamics. And finally, in a shocking development, it seems that heterosexuals themselves are discovering equitable marriage roles.

These last two leave me shaking my head. Obviously in a same-sex marriage gender is not part of the power dynamics, but why should the power dynamics be affected by gender in the first place? And is it really that novel that some straight couples eschew gender roles? I certainly grew up with the expectation that both partners in a marriage share responsibilities equally, and that’s the norm among my friends, too.

The California Supreme Court, that’s who.

By now you’ve heard of the historic decision allowing same-sex marriage. Lambda Legal has a brief analysis of the decision, where they highlight the signficance of the ruling.

What this means personally is that Knox and I need could get legally married in California, though Vancouver remains closer. That’s in principle; it turns out that the ruling is not final unless no appeals or motions are filed within 30 days.

The decision caught me by surprise. Not because I expected the court to rule one way or the other, but rather because the case wasn’t even on my radar. Yes, I knew some cases were winding their way through the courts, but I wasn’t following.

This is a big change from the days of the Massachusetts legal victory and the rallies to defend the state constitution. Or even from more recent tracking of gay issues in the news. Why is this?

Part of this is political fatigue. Eight years of the national nightmare that is George W. Bush have taken their toll. I feel like I’m tuned out of the political process. Even in this presidential campaign, I’m tired of the posturing and plain-folksiness, the moralizing, the hyperbole.

Part of my encroaching apathy, too, is the volume and insignificance of the blogosphere. I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, nor am I reaching masses of people. It’s just a fraction of my friends who bother to check my blog or RSS feed. And face-to-face debates? Much the same. No new points are brought up. Yes, talking to friends and neighbors about issues is a good way to effect change, but it is slow, laborious, and not scalable.

I care about the issues. I don’t care about the noise. More and more I seek refuge in the determinism of computer code, or the plainness of physical activity.

But I’m excited about the marriage victory.

Life has been filled with interesting events I’ve been wanting to put on this blog, but I haven’t had time. Luckily, the fianz is better about bloggoimg, so here’s a quick update with links:

• We went to Grayland State Park, where I got to fly my first kite.
• We picked out plants for the front garden and I put them in. Played in the dirt all day!
• We went to New York. We even ventured out of Manhattan to see the botanical garden’s exhibition on Darwin’s Garden.

I may get around to putting up more backdated detailed posts. Or not.

Knox got an Airport Express for his Mac. For now, we’ll use it as our music streaming solution, though my eventual goal is to get something like a Squeezebox or Sonos.

Setting up the AEX to work with the Mac was mostly simple, with one caveat: to get onto our existing wireless network, we had to provide the hex version of our 64-bit ASCII WEP key as the 40-bit WEP key the Mac dialog was asking for.

For Linux, it’s slightly more involved. I found out about raop_play, a simplistic music client that, most importantly, includes a driver such that ALSA applications can stream music to a virtual audio card which actually gets streamed to the AEX. Pretty nifty.

I followed Nils Winkler’s instructions for setting up raop_play. Here’s the additional stuff I had to do to get this to work:

• Before compiling, install the following packages libsamplerate-devel fltk fltk-devel libid3tag-devel fltk-fluid

• Delete the line #include <linux/config.h> in drivers/alsa_raoppcm.c

• Patch the kernel module source

• Create Nils’s suggested scripts: load_airport_express_driver, start_airport_express, and stop_airport_express. Modify start_airport_express to have the IP address of the AEX.

At this point, the basic infrastructure was working:

• Run start_airport_express

• Verify the sound “card” is installed: cat /proc/asound/cards

• Play some music: sudo mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 some_song.mp3

Unfortunately, I couldn’t run as non-root. My devices on /dev/snd look like this:

 drwxr-xr-x   2 root root        180 2008-04-06 07:44 .
 drwxr-xr-x  14 root root       5200 2008-04-06 07:44 ..
 crw-rw----+  1 root root     116, 6 2008-04-06 07:42 controlC0
 crw-rw----   1 root root     116, 8 2008-04-06 07:44 controlC1
 crw-rw----+  1 root root     116, 5 2008-04-06 07:42 pcmC0D0c
 crw-rw----+  1 root root     116, 4 2008-04-06 07:42 pcmC0D0p
 crw-rw----   1 root root     116, 7 2008-04-06 07:44 pcmC1D0p
 crw-rw----+  1 root root     116, 3 2008-04-06 07:42 seq
 crw-rw----+  1 root root     116, 2 2008-04-06 07:42 timer

The C1 entries are used raop_play, but you’ll notice they don’t have a + in the permissions column. Why is that? What does the + mean? Tell me if you know!

On a hunch, though, I chowned controlC1 and pcmC1d0p to my user group—and I could play as non-root.

Well, mostly. I can stream music from applications that let me select the ALSA device, such as mplayer and xmss. Unfortunately, I don’t see how to configure rhythmbox to use raop_player. (Tell me if you know!)

You know the movies where they take the DNA of long-deceased person or dinosaur and bring them back to life?

Scientists have done this with some of the earliest audio recordings.

On the issues, I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are pretty darn close, particularly when one considers the political realities the winner will face when taking the oath of office. From their records, perhaps some differences can be gleaned, though whether those differences matter— or ought to matter— may well be an unresolvable question.

But dammit if it isn’t upsetting to see the unfairness Clinton is up against!

First, there is the sexism and misogyny with which she is portrayed. You can find one compendium of reports here, and a depressing suggestion that we may be better able to shed racial than gender prejudice here.

And then there’s the divisiveness factor. Many people will not vote for Clinton because she is so divisive, and in so doing for that reason, they perpetuate the very divisiveness they seek to avoid. Moreover, by eschewing Clinton in order to get Republicans out of office, they are playing into the hands of these same Republicans who made her a divisive figure in the first place by focusing the nation’s attention on a protracted, expensive, and ultimately useless witch hunt during her husband’s presidency.

Part of me wishes this could be a controlled experiment, with candidates identical save their gender and race—and with equal baggage. Maybe then we’d see whether indeed our sexism and racism are so ingrained (and which one more so) as to determine our electoral choices. But when people are adamant about voting for “anyone but Hillary” in the general election, how can we deny these prejudices abound?