I have discovered that mac ipods (those that have been restored to factory settings on a mac) are read by Ubuntu as read-only, which means you can’t change the music on a mac ipod from a Ubuntu machine [1]. Alternatively, windows ipods (those restored on a windows machine) are read/writable, which means you can upload new music to that ipod.

I figured this out after reading the ipod linux (a version of linux that runs on your ipod) installlation instructions. ipod linux requires that the ipod you want to install ipod linux on is a windows ipod. Since we don’t have a working windows machine at my house, I used a windows machine my husband brought home from work and restored the ipod to its factory settings on it. Thinking that the reason that ipod linux requires that windows ipods be used, I plugged my ipod up to my linux machine and tada, it wasn’t read-only!

---

1: I didn’t think about this until later, but I am guessing that I could have changed the device’s permissions using sudo. I thought I had tried that, but I guess I didn’t do it correctly.

1. Airbag
2. Paranoid Android and here too
3. Subterranean Homesick Alien
4. Exit Music
5. Let Down
6. Karma Police
7. Fitter Happier
8. Electioneering
9. Climbing Up The Walls
10. No Surprises
11. Lucky
12. Tourist, The

I didn’t know that ruby has multiline comments.

=begin

Name:

Last Updated:

Location:

...

=end

Well, at least I wasn’t the only one.

“There wasn’t the slightest possible chance that they could go to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mr. Ramsay snapped out irascibly.

How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. “Damn you”, he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible any outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said.”

- from To the Lighthouse

I finally got around to generating a sitemap for this site. I used these instructions for creating sitemaps in rails. Very simple and straight forward instructions.

Unfortunately, the sitemap created isn’t valid according to google. The xml document created has <link> tags instead of <loc> tags which google webmaster requires.

I am guessing that these errors mean that my sitemap is useless to Google. Still looking for a solution and will post an update as soon as I find one.

mouseHole is a personal proxy server written in ruby, allowing you to…

rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser.

To get mouseHole up and running, first install the required gems (json and sqlite3) if you don’t already have them installed. I encountered the following issues while installing those gems…

Installing json

lib/json/editor.rb:977:50: ’:’ not followed by identified or operator

The solution is to remove the colon from line 977.

Installing sqlite3

The command for installing the sqlite3 gem is gem install sqlite3-ruby and not gem install sqlite3.

Lastly, if you are running Debian or Ubuntu, visit http://localhost:3704 instead of http://127.0.0.1:3704 after starting mouseHole.

Ok, the idea for this very lazy post came from this site that has a very cool collection of movies available free on YouTube and similar sites.

Pirates of the Silicon Valley in its entirety is on YouTube. Enjoy!

and Frequently used commands I can’t seem to remember the exact syntax of. Nothin’ fancy.

Linux
find . -name \*.* | xargs grep search_string

navigate to folder you would like to search, enter this command with the search string you would like to find and this command lists all files containing that string

ps x -Ho pid,args

lists all of the processes running

find / -name gcc

finds all folders named gcc

sed '/$/,/' /home/Desktop/jessirae > /home/Desktop/jessirae2

places a comma at the end of each line

paste -sd '\0' - /home/Desktop/jessirae2 > /home/Desktop/jessirae3

The NEWLINE character of every line except the last line in each input file will be replaced with a separator

Ruby

"<a href=\"http://www.oldurl.com\">JessiRae.com</a>". gsub(/(http?:\/{2})\S+\.(\w+)(\S+)/,"http://www.jessirae.com/blog/")

global substitution replaces all instances of some expression in a string with some other string or performs some function on that string

require 'open-uri' .... open(url) { |page| page_content = page.read() page_content }

returns html from specified webpage

10 Things I Wonder About You, ah, me, that is… per Kathy’s Request:

1. What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? Researching legal issues surrounding Open Source software – because of the huge variety of licences out there.
2. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? I wish I would really try hard. You know like answering my cell phone when it rings and working through massive sleep deprivation.
3. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? Set up a web server at my house.
4. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? I would like to learn to play the guitar so I could wail like Frank Zappa could. I would like to be better at wearing accessories because they make me feel more confident and put together.
5. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? Probably Leibniz. I would hope to learn how calculus and the notion of possible worlds came to him.
6. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you? Quiet, Thinker, Weird
7. Now list two more words you wish described you… Fierce, Cunning
8. What are your top three passions? Technology, Fashion, Metaphysics
9. Write -and answer – one more question that YOU would ask someone. What is the coolest thing you have learned about? Either Photosynthesis or the ontological argument for God’s Existence.
10. What is one question you wish people would ask themselves? How do you know x? :-)