Cyde Weys Musings

Version 4.1 of the K Desktop Environment (the first release of KDE 4.x suitable for everyday use) for GNU/Linux came out recently, and last week I decided to give it a try. It’s pretty good, but it’s still a bit unpolished. Installing it in Ubuntu was simple, except for an error with one of the packages that forced me to remove them all, then install them again in a specific order using the dist-upgrade command. The process will become smoother when it hits the main Ubuntu branch, but for now, just be forewarned that it still has a bit of a “beta” feel to it.

KDE 4.1 also did something weird with my xorg.conf, so I have to restore it to a working version upon each boot or I get dumped back into the basic vesa driver which can only display a resolution of 640×480. Luckily I hardly ever reboot, or this would be more of an annoyance. Again, I expect this to be something that’s fixed in the final release. I don’t think these problems are even KDE 4.1’s fault, but rather, a problem in the way the Ubuntu packager configured things.

So, after debugging the problems (and you wouldn’t even be interested in checking out bleeding edge software releases if you seriously minded contributing to the edge being bleeding in the first place), KDE 4.1 is up and running, and it’s really nice. Whereas KDE 3.5 seemed to draw inspiration for its appearance from Windows 95, KDE 4.1 draws its inspiration from Windows Vista, and even gives it a run for its money. KDE 4.1 is a pleasure to look at, right from the boot-up screen all the way to the everyday tasks performed in the desktop environment. Even the applications menu, with its smoothly animated sliding pages, is well done. Appearance matters a lot more than most free software folks will admit to, so it’s good to see a free software project that really gets it.

KDE 4’s best new feature has to be the desktop plasmoids. A plasmoid is a view of a folder that goes on the desktop, so it is always beneath all other opened applications and does not show up on the taskbar. The simplest use of a plasmoid is to show the contents of the desktop folder (creating a desktop folder plasmoid the size of the entire screen emulates the behavior in other desktop environments). Plasmoids are nice because they corral the icons that normally overwhelm a desktop into a nice sortable box. And then the real power of the plasmoid is revealed when you create other plasmoids — one plasmoid for your Documents folder, another for the download directory for Mozilla Firefox, another for the download directory for BitTorrent, etc. All of the files you need are always at your finger tips, in a neat orderly manner that don’t overwhelm your task bar. Organizing your files is as easy as dragging icons from one plasmoid to another. It’s such an incredible user interface improvement it makes you wonder why no one else has thought of it before. Oh wait, they sort of have — anyone remember Windows 3.1 and its persistent folder windows?

KDE 4.1 is also lacking some configuration options in comparison to KDE 3.5, but it’s apparently already a lot better than KDE 4.0 was, and most of the configuration options should be restored soon in future releases. All of the basic options are there, you just don’t have the kind of intricate configurability that long-time KDE users might expect.

I would love to write about all of the new desktop widgets, but alas, I couldn’t get any of them working, and this error is echoed by others out there trying out the Ubuntu build of KDE 4.1. This looks like another error by the packager. Oh well. KDE 4.1 on Ubuntu is still perfectly usable as is, it just doesn’t have all the bells-and-whistles. If the problems I’ve listed so far aren’t deal-breakers for you, go ahead and download KDE 4.1 and try it out. Otherwise, you might want to wait another few weeks or so until the official mainline release is out. Even if you’ve never used KDE before (which is quite common for Ubuntu users, seeing as how Gnome is the default window manager), you ought to give it a serious try. You might really like it.

It’s just starting to sink in for me how important the recent inclusion of the Free Software Ogg codecs in Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will turn out to be, especially concerning the Ogg Theora video codec. This will be the first chance for a non-proprietary video codec to really break into the mainstream. Combine Firefox’s now-native support for it (with its >20% market share) and Wikipedia, which only accepts video uploads in Ogg Theora format, and we have a powerhouse for advancing the adoption of non-proprietary codecs. This is big news. Hell, I was interviewed by LinuxInsider on the topic and all I’m really responsible for is increasing public knowledge of this recent event.

As I said in that article, we’re close to reaching the point where video will be natively supported by all browsers on all platforms just as smoothly as images are today. This will have an amazing effect on the usability of the web, and by extension, what humanity is capable of doing with it. It will certainly give many companies (especially smaller start-ups with less funding) a better chance to establish a video foothold on the web, with no more licensing of finicky Flash players or H.264 codecs required. Naturally, it will do wonders for the ease of including video content on personal sites as well.

But don’t think the war is won just yet. There are many hard battles yet to fight in the war for adoption of non-proprietary multimedia codecs. We already lost one of the battles, when Apple and Nokia argued vociferously (and successfully) to remove the Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora wording from the HTML 5 draft spec. But the Mozilla Foundation has now successfully managed to ensure that Ogg codec compliance can no longer be ignored. And surprisingly, Microsoft isn’t even the enemy here. As I pointed out in the article, Microsoft isn’t averse to using non-proprietary codecs — they used Ogg Vorbis to handle music in the PC release of Halo, for instance. No, the real enemies here are Nokia and Apple, two members of the MPEG-LA patent pool who are currently making millions of undeserved dollars off of questionable cartel-held software patents that stifle innovation in the multimedia web space and hinder adoption of web video.

The big patent-holders like Apple and Nokia are arguing so tenaciously because they know that once non-proprietary codecs have gained a foothold in any niche, the proprietary codecs lose it permanently. Free (as in free speech) codecs have such clear advantages over non-free codecs, not least of which is that multimedia device manufacturers don’t have to pay licensing fees, that once a free codec becomes viable, no non-free codec will ever be able to reclaim that niche again. So the patent holders will fight tooth-and-nail against losing their cash cows, but inevitably that is what will happen. It’s only a matter of time. We’ve already seen it with the image and document formats — now audio and video are next.

Great news, Free Software fans! As of last night, out-of-the-box support for the Ogg Theora (video) and Ogg Vorbis (audio) open format codecs was enabled on the mainline Firefox development branch. Here’s the exact diff. These two codecs work in conjunction with the new <video> and <audio> tags, which will be supported in the next major release of Firefox, 3.1. If you’re feeling impatient, you can download the nightly 3.1 release which already includes the brand new Ogg codec support.

But what is the advantage of native browser support for the new tags, you may be wondering? The HTML 5 spec has lots of details, but what it boils down to is no longer having to rely on kludgy proprietary plugins like Flash or Quicktime (which often don’t work well cross-platform, I might add) to display multimedia content. The new tags work just like the current <img> tag does: feed them the URL to the appropriate media resource and they display it, just as simply as one might include a JPG image in a webpage. It’s such an obvious improvement over the previous state of affairs of dealing with online video that it really makes you wonder why it took so long. We’re several years into the online video revolution now (led by such giants as YouTube), so it’s only fair that we finally get native browser support for videos.

It’s important to point out that not only are the Ogg codecs free (as in both speech and beer) and unencumbered by patents, but that Ogg Theora’s performance has recently been significantly improved. It’s not quite as good as H.264, but it is better than many of the previous generation’s proprietary codecs, and it’s currently the best video codec around that is compatible with the Free Software philosophy. That’s why the Mozilla Foundation chose it to provide out-of-the-box video support in Firefox — all of the alternatives currently widely used for web video, such as flv, H.264, or DivX, are copyright and patent-encumbered, and thus could not be included in Firefox. It’s worth pointing out that Ogg Theora is also the only video codec allowed on all Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia.

Not too long from now, after Firefox 3.1 is released, a significant double digit percentage of the web will have Ogg-enabled browsers. That will be a huge achievement for the Xiph.Org Foundation. Expect to see a lot more online video in the Free Software world, and hopefully a migration away from Flash video players, which I still can’t for the life of me get to work reliably in GNU/Linux. Once the <video> tag does start cropping up in a large number of places, will the competing browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari have any choice but to support it as well? Since all of the Ogg codecs are released under BSD-style — not GPL-style — licenses, there’s nothing stopping them!

I know what you’re thinking — as if GNU/Linux and ham radio couldn’t possibly be nerdy enough when separate, let’s put them together! But let’s take a step back …

I started getting involved with ham radio just three months ago with VHF/UHF voice FM, and already I’m hungering for more. I don’t have an HF rig yet, and might actually not have one for awhile, but since I know it’s something I’ll want to do eventually, I figure I should just start learning Morse code now. As for why I want to learn Morse code, I couldn’t exactly tell you — there’s just a certain romance to it, and pounding away on a key is such a delightfully different method of communicating than just speaking into a microphone. But ignoring why I want to learn it, here’s how I’m going about doing it, in GNU/Linux no less.

Learning Morse code on the computer is actually harder than it should be. I couldn’t find any Flash or Java applets that do something as simple as generate Morse code. Seriously. I found some really old Java applets that no longer function in current JDKs, but they don’t count. I found lots of DOS programs, many of which are pushing two decades old, but I wasn’t having much luck with them even under Windows. And since I’m running GNU/Linux as my primary desktop now, these programs weren’t helpful at all. Luckily, there’s a simple up-to-date command-line utility for GNU/Linux that does all the basics with a minimum of fuss.

First, you’ll want the morse program. In Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get install morse

If you’re not using Ubuntu or Debian, you should be able to find it using the package manager in your distro of choice.

Now, learning Morse is as simple as passing in the right command-line parameters to morse. Here’s what I’ve started with:

morse -rC 'ETAOINSHRDLU' -w 5 -Ts

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When I was installing Ubuntu GNU/Linux with KDE on my latest desktop purchase, I faced a seemingly agonizing decision between 32-bit and 64-bit. There are all sorts of peripheral arguments over performance, but the main arguments on each side are that 32-bit can only support 4 GB of RAM (not technically true) and that 64-bit has limited application support and is more buggy.

Well, I’m happy to report that all of the supposed caveats of 64-bit GNU/Linux completely failed to materialize. After over a week of heavy usage of 64-bit Ubuntu, and installation of a few hundred applications, I haven’t run across a single problem stemming from my decision to use 64-bit. So I would say the choice of 64-bit is a no-brainer. 64-bit has reached maturity, and all of the supposed problems with it are problems of the past. 64-bit is the future of computing (just like 32-bit was the future of computing back when 16-bit was still common). It’s better to make the switch now than to find yourself a year or two down the line facing a 64-bit reinstallation of a 32-bit system. This choice is pretty much set in stone when you install an operating system; there is no upgrade path. So make the correct choice now.

I should point out that not all processors support 64-bit OSes. The older the processor, the less likely it is to offer 64-bit support. So do your due diligence before you accidentally end up downloading the wrong version of a GNU/Linux distribution ISO.

I just ran across a level of stupid so off the charts I had to immediately comment on it here lest my inaction unwittingly foster an environment tolerant of such stupidity. Allow me to quote from a post on Linuxforums:

When I say cd’d I mean I used the command cd, to change directory.
So for example say I downloaded and extracted the drivers to the desktop I would open a Konsole window and type:
sudo cd /home/sebmaster/desktop/[folder extracted to]/
(You probably dont need sudo but I have got into the habit of adding it before pretty much everything)

Those of you are familiar with GNU/Linux should see this heaping mound of stupidity for what it is immediately, and will likely find the following explanation superfluous. For the rest of you, here’s a detailed explanation.

There are two distinct nexuses (nexi?) of stupidity inherent in this quote. The first is the notion that sudo, a wrapper program that executes the program passed to it as an argument with root (adminstrator) privileges, will do anything with the change directory command. It won’t. Cd is a shell command; it is not a program. Sudo can’t even find it. The exact error message I get is “sudo: cd: command not found”. And even if cd was a program, using it in this way wouldn’t do anything, since the new working directory would be lost when the sudo subshell terminated. And even if that did work, it still wouldn’t be useful, because there’s no point in setting your working directory to a directory you don’t have access to anyway. You’re still going to need to use sudo with every subsequent command just to get access to those files, so the sudo cp is superfluous; just skip the cd altogether and use a qualified path to the files.

But that’s not even touching on the second (and greater) nexus of stupidity, which is the very-Windows-like mindset that everything should be run as administrator. Saying “You probably dont need sudo but I have got into the habit of adding it before pretty much everything” is like saying “You probably don’t need a live hand grenade but I have got into the habit of carrying one around with me everywhere I go.” Like a live hand grenade, sudo is potentially very dangerous, as the root account has total access to the system (so simple mistakes or security compromises become far worse than they would with mere user account permissions). The mantra to live by is: Never run anything as root unless it is absolutely necessary. As soon as I read that this faithful deliverer-of-the-stupid executes pretty much everything as root out of force of habit, I stood up from my computer, placed my hand over my face, and let out a very long, exasperated sigh. Why doesn’t he just su at the beginning of every terminal session and get it over with?

Oh wait, I probably shouldn’t have said that. He’s probably going to read that last bit, miss all the rest of the content in this post, and think that’s a good idea. “Hey, now I don’t even have to type sudo anymore, because everything I do is always as root!” Yes, even changing directories.

If this post seems a little glowing, don’t be alarmed; it’s because I’m still basking in the brilliant sheen of my new GNU/Linux desktop (which I am composing this blog post on as I type these very words — and these words, too). That’s right, I went through with my plans for setting up a GNU/Linux desktop, though I didn’t actually use the parts list I threw together two weeks ago. I ran across an amazing deal through Dell’s small business site (instant savings of nearly half off!) on an Inspiron 530 and I jumped on it. For $360 ($407 after shipping and state taxes), I got a nice little Dell mini-tower with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 processor, 2 GB of DDR2 PC2 6400 RAM, 500GB SATA hard drive with 16 MB cache, SATA DVD burner, keyboard, and optical scroll mouse. It ended up being about the same price as the parts list I put together, but the performance is marginally better, with the added possibility of upgrading to 4 GB of RAM. It also came with Windows Vista Home Premium, which I suppose would be a value add-in for some, but which just made me wince at how much cheaper I could have gotten this system without paying the Microsoft tax. Anyway, Vista’s in the trash now, where it belongs, and the price was good enough that I’m not worrying about it.

Installing the OS

I was going to install Kubuntu on my new system, but I opted for Ubuntu instead on a recommendation from Drinian, who says that Kubuntu isn’t quite as well put-together. The only reason I wanted Kubuntu was because I wanted to run KDE instead of Gnome, but it turns out that’s incredibly easy to accomplish in Ubuntu (just install the kubuntu-desktop meta-package in aptitude, then set your login session to KDE). So choosing Ubuntu over Kubuntu hasn’t left me disappointed in any way.

Unfortunately, installing Ubuntu GNU/Linux still wasn’t as easy as it should have been. I blame the problem on hardware incompatibilities, most likely with the SATA controller on the motherboard. The installation CD wouldn’t boot without passing the kernel parameter “all_generic_ide”, which is something I can handle but the average computer user is likely to be turned off by. Then, after the installation completed, my system wouldn’t boot from the hard drive for the same reason, so I had to boot back into the LiveCD environment, mount my boot partition, and then edit grub’s (a bootloader) menu.lst to pass that same kernel parameter. So, yeah, GNU/Linux isn’t exactly friendly for the masses, at least not on this hardware. Curiously enough, I had this exact same problem when dual-booting Fedora Core (another distribution of GNU/Linux) on my previous desktop. There’s definitely some room for improvement in this area by either the Linux kernel developers or the Ubuntu packagers. There’s no real reason this can’t be one of those things that “Just Works”.

Naming the system

But after the minor hitch with “all_generic_ide” , everything else worked just fine. It was the smoothest GNU/Linux installation I believe I’ve ever done. The GNU/Linux graphical installers have become quite advanced, completely putting anything Microsoft offers up to shame. Actually, the part of the installation process that took the longest time was picking a name for my new computer. I have a long history of naming computers after various mythologies, deities, or nerdy things (Ixion, Dark Anima, Fyre, Quezacoatl, Geminoid, Phoenix, etc.), so I wanted to continue the theme. I figured since this is the first time I’ve ever used a dedicated GNU/Linux system as my primary desktop (as opposed to Microsoft Windows), I wanted to emphasize the change this brings to my computing life. So I got into a lively discussion on IRC with someone who apparently knows a good deal about ancient Greek/Roman mythology, and his best suggestion was the Roman god Vertumnus, who is “the god of seasons, change and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees”. I liked both the change aspect and the environmental aspect, so Vertumnus it was.

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The other day, I was realizing that I don’t use GNU/Linux as often as I should. Sure, I run it exclusively on my servers, but I still use Windows on the desktop for the most part. That’s more out of habit than out of any need. Everything I currently do in Windows I can do in GNU/Linux, except for the games, which I’m playing more and more occasionally these days. I was dual-booting my current desktop with Windows XP and GNU/Linux for awhile, but it proved to be inconvenient. My computers’ uptimes, both servers and desktops, are typically measured in months (only going down for crashes and power losses). It takes awhile to reboot and restart all of the applications I typically have running, so I don’t do it by choice. Thus you can see the problem with dual-booting: it entails constant rebooting, which I had to do as often as I felt like playing a Windows game. And then once I was in Windows I wouldn’t want to go through the hassle of booting into GNU/Linux only to boot back into Windows the next time I wanted to play a game. It simply wasn’t working.

So I now see the problem with my initial attempts at using GNU/Linux on the desktop. I simply don’t have the patience to put up with all of those constant reboots and interruptions in my computing environment. I’m too lazy. I’m simply going to get another desktop to use exclusively for GNU/Linux, while making every effort to only use my current Windows desktop for playing games. And luckily, making a desktop computer is cheaper than it’s ever been. Here is a current parts list I put together just yesterday for a killer GNU/Linux desktop.

The specs

• $90 — MSI Saturn 945 Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel 945GC 2 x 240Pin Intel GMA 950 Barebone - Retail
• $132 — Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz 3MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail
• $38 — G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model F2-4200PHU2-2GBNT - Retail
• $95 — Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

This complete GNU/Linux system costs only $355. Throw in shipping and we’ll call it $380. That’s a really cheap price considering how powerful this system is. Avoiding the Microsoft tax by choosing a Free operating system pays huge dividends when the overall system is cheap. Allow me to explain the choices I made in putting this system together with individual analyses of each other components:

The barebone system

First of all, I save a lot of money with this computer by building it into a barebone system. A price of $90 for a case, power supply, and motherboard is really hard to beat. You can easily spend over $90 for each of those individual components (and in fact, when I built my current desktop, I did). Getting a good barebone system is an excellent way to save a lot of money on a low-end desktop. If you’re not building a low-end desktop, I wouldn’t bother. The limitations can be significant. For instance, the motherboard that ships in the barebone I picked out supports a maximum of 2 GB of RAM; fine for a low-end system, but you really want 4 GB of RAM on a medium or high end system. And the power supply is only 250W; again, fine for a low end system, but don’t expect it to be able to power, say, a high-end discrete video card. And naturally the motherboard doesn’t support dual video cards, which would be an upgrade path you might want to keep open on a system you’re outlaying more money on. It also doesn’t support quad-core processors. So there are limitations, but for a low-level system, you won’t run into them.

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In the year that I’ve been running this blog, I’ve accumulated a decent number of WordPress plugins. Some I now consider essential; others are merely neat. The list below contains every WordPress plugin I currently have running on this blog, in alphabetical order (say you entirely wanted to duplicate the look of this blog, this list would be a good place to start). And if you see some missing from the list that you think I should be running, well, let me know in the comments.

1. All in One SEO Pack. I know the name sounds kind of evil (SEO is a four-letter word in many parts of the Internet), but this plugin is really innocuous. The main functionality that I use is its ability to nicely and cleanly give posts meta descriptions, which show up under the page title in a search engine listing. It also lets you adjust all sorts of keywords, other meta tags, page titles, etc., but I haven’t messed around with that stuff yet.
2. AskApache RewriteRules Viewer displays a list of URL rewriting rules, both those of WordPress and any applicable .htaccess files. It helped me out when I was debugging a permalink structure change. Though I haven’t used it since, I still keep it around just in case.
3. Flexible Upload is a very useful plugin that extends the functionality of uploading and using images in WordPress. It creates thumbnails of a given size on the fly and offers increased control in how an image is placed within a post (without having to manually adjust the HTML). It will also do automatic watermarking for you. Just a caveat though, version 1.9 has some sort of incompatibility with certain themes or WordPress 2.3.x or something, so I’m running 1.8.
4. Google XML Sitemaps automatically creates an XML sitemap of your blog and keeps it updated over time. XML sitemaps are still kind of a new thing, but Google is using them, and having one can potentially increase the visibility of some of your harder-to-find pages in search rankings. If nothing else, at least its output is nifty.
5. In Series adds series functionality to WordPress. Think of a series as categories with ordering, so each post has a numbered table of contents linking to the other pages in the series as well as “Previous” and “Next” links. I’m using it for my telescope-making work log and my Diamondback opinion columns. One caveat: the only way to prevent the table of contents (which can get long) from displaying on the front page is by hacking up your theme. The next version of this plugin will make it a simple configuration option.
6. Live Comment Preview implements live comment previewing in pure JavaScript, no AJAX or additional server calls required. A caveat, recent versions seem to have problems for logged in users (i.e. you) with WordPress 2.3.x on non-Internet Explorer browsers, so I’m using version 1.7.
7. No Self Pings prevents your newly written posts from generating pingbacks on previous posts. Some people like them; I don’t.
8. Random Posts Widget displays a number of links to random posts on your blog. I used to have a “Best posts” heading, but maintaining it was too much of a hassle, so I removed it and simply went for the random links. The ability to browse through a blog randomly rather than having to go chronologically or by category is great, and by giving a choice of posts for someone to click on, they can pick the one that most interests them. If you haven’t tried out the random links yet, do have a go. Most of the traffic on this blog is on recent posts, but the older posts don’t have any less quality.
9. Raz-Captcha adds a CAPTCHA to user login and/or user registration. I just have it turned on for registration, because too many spammers were automatically registering accounts in the vain hope that being logged in would let their spammy comments through my spam filter (it doesn’t).
10. Recent Comments Widget displays the most recent comments anywhere on the blog. This is one of my favorite plugins. It fosters discussion and also makes tracking down spam comments on old posts easy. At a simple glance of my page, anyone can see where the latest comments are, and then if they feel like it, they can respond to them. Without this plugin, this default WordPress functionality only displays a list of latest comments in the blog’s admin interface.
11. Redirection is a redirection manager that can change a bunch of different aspects on how redirects are handled, but I only use it for one thing. I changed my permalinks structure to remove the /index.php/ part recently, yet WordPress was sending back HTTP codes of 302, or “Moved Temporarily”, along with all of the redirects to the new permalink URLs. This is bad, as it can split up search engine karma across multiple pages. So I used Redirection to change the HTTP code to 301, or “Moved Permanently”. This tells search engines to update everything to point to the new URL.
12. Spam Karma 2 is one of those plugins that I don’t know how I’d live without. It’s caught tens of thousands of spam comments so far. I cannot even imagine trying to handle all of that manually. And it’s false positive rate is amazingly low. Put simply, if you are running a WordPress blog on the public Internet, you need an anti-spam solution, and Spam Karma 2 is much more configurable and feature-full than WordPress’s default, Akismet.
13. Update Manager keeps track of your plugins and lets you know when a new version of one is available. Not much more to say about that. Just be wary about upgrading; as the caveats above show, newer is not always better.
14. WordPress.com Stats tabulates post view statistics in a blog-aware fashion (as opposed to the other stats tracker I use, awstats, which just knows about web pages in general). The plugin itself basically just farms out all of the work to WordPress.com’s servers (for which you need a free API key). If you don’t want them knowing the intimate details of your blog readership, you don’t want this plugin.
15. WordPress Automatic Upgrade provides a smooth way of upgrading WordPress whenever new versions come out. Instead of having to manually backup your database and upload the new WordPress files, this plugin handles everything. It’s very nice, but you don’t end up using it that often simply because WordPress updates don’t come out all that frequently.
16. WP Super Cache is a caching plugin that stores rendered HTML versions of your blog pages. It’s very useful for keeping your site up and running if you were to be, say, Digged or Slashdotted. I currently have it installed but not running, however, because the way it caches means that dynamic widgets like Recent Comments end up not updating on individual pages until the expiration time of the cache is reached. But I still have it ready to turn on at a moment’s notice should I get hit with a flood of traffic.

So that’s all of the WordPress plugins that I’m using. I hope that I at least gave you some leads on useful ones. The WordPress software is pretty barebone, lacking a lot of near-required functionality that you only get through plugins. I just wish someone would release a plugin that auto-moderates all Trackbacks and Pingbacks. Yes, there are some older ones out there, but none are compatible with WordPress 2.3. I’ve had such a problem with splogs sending me pingbacks and trackbacks (which Spam Karma doesn’t catch because those links actually exist, they’re just one of thousands of fake posts) that I’ve had to turn off Pingbacks and Trackbacks altogether. I really wish I could re-enable them. If you find out about a plugin for this that works with WordPress 2.3, please let me know!

Several years ago, I bought many albums from the iTunes Music Store. I know, it was a stupid thing to do, and I regret it. But back then, I had a PowerBook (which has since broken), so everything “just worked”. Well, I have a new laptop now that I’m running GNU/Linux on, so it no longer “just works”. Luckily, I’ve found a solution that does work.

The first step is stripping the abysmal “FairPlay” DRM (that’s Digital Restrictions Management to those in the know) off of the encrypted m4p song files that I purchased. This was fairly easy using a program called QTFairUse — unfortunately, it only runs on Windows. You won’t find anything to do it under GNU/Linux because it needs to use iTunes to work.

So once I stripped the encryption off the .m4p files, I was left with these .m4a song files. They’re not encrypted, but they’re also not a very widely used format, and aren’t supported by most audio player software. The simplest solution would just be to transcode them to ogg or mp3, but that’s a bad idea. You shouldn’t ever convert from one lossy format to another. It’s like making a xerox copy of a xerox copy; the quality loss accumulates. Now if you have a non-iPod portable digital music player, you don’t really have many choices, because none of them support m4a. Personally, I don’t see anything ethically wrong with downloading nice quality mp3s of songs you’ve already purchased just to avoid the transcoding quality loss, but I’m sure the law disagrees with me there.

Anyway, I digress. This tutorial is about playing m4a files natively under Gentoo GNU/Linux, without having to transcode them and suffer a loss of quality. It works perfectly for me, since I don’t even use my portable digital music player anymore. I just play everything on my computers. I’ll be using my favorite Free Software audio player program in this tutorial, Amarok. Luckily, everything necessary for the playback of m4a files is already in the source code — it just isn’t compiled in by default. So we’ll have to modify the USE flags to get it to work. But don’t fret; this is a very common procedure in Gentoo GNU/Linux.

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