You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2008.
Hopefully I’ll be have time to post details about the classical education conference in the next day or two. In the meantime, do take a moment to read this brief but “informative” essay by historian Neil Postman. It’s a tiny taste of the type of thing we enjoyed at the conference. You won’t regret it.
My wife and I will be traveling to a classical education conference in Austin, TX this week so I will be comparatively unavailable for the next few days. The conference is mandatory attendance for her (she teaches at a classical school here in OK) and I thought I’d tag along. The theme is “Recovering Goodness, Truth and Beauty.” I look forward to having some interesting things to write about upon my return. Among the workshop speakers are Douglas Wilson and his son, N.D. Wilson. Back in a bit.
Perhaps I ought to have titled this “how to re-import your whole CD library, originally done in Windows, when your external USB drive’s HFS+ partition coughs up a bowl of bits.” I looked all over the internet to try to get an indication of the best or most efficient way to rip, tag, and organize my disc collection in Linux Mint. I found a lot of information, and a lot of “articles” that were really just thinly disguised spec lists of FOSS audio programs. In the end I was forced to figure it out on my own as a result of having too many options.
The good news is that, for an aspiring audiophile, EAC runs under WINE in Linux Mint (rel. 5) with no trouble. You can read a pretty concise formulation of the procedure required to make it happen here. That’s the first route I went. It wasn’t particularly easy from there.
See, I’m one of those wierdos who regularly keeps digital music in more than one format. I prefer “lossless” files, but the portable music players available to me (and my car CD player, that reads MP3) won’t play those. Not to mention that they’re bigger than lossy files. For this reason, I must have at least two formats available. My practice up to the present has been to keep FLAC on hand for home listening, MP3 for comparatively high-quality listening with devices that read no other format, and ogg for maximum compression with devices that can use it. (I do prefer to use free software and open standards whenever possible.) Properly speaking, then, I have three music libraries to manage. And I have a lot of music.
After some experimentation, I discovered that the familiar batch conversion tools that I intended to use in order to keep all these libraries straight (especially tagging in all those formats) would have to run through EAC. Those tools (WinXP versions) were a lot fussier in WINE. It’s important to understand that I was trying to avoid, at all costs, the need to write a bunch of file- and filename-conversion scripts. Originally I began ripping the discs in EAC and pulling the raw .wavs over into Sound Converter. I quickly realized that Sound Converter didn’t give me the flexiblity over the command-line encoding options that I needed, so that plan was out. I further realized that no tagging was being preserved in the EAC -> Sound Converter process, so I implemented a third step and a third piece of software, EasyTag, to (hopefully) pull info from CDDB. By this time, managing the directory structure and file info in just one format was a hassle. What’s more, I could see I’d need to add another software step or two before it was a working chain. I dropped back to punt.
I thought, “Surely there’s an easier way.” There is. But it doesn’t involve EAC at all, and that kept me from using it for a while. When I finally gave in it was a good day. The piece of sofware that will do it all for you (with most of the tweaks you want) is called grip. Grip works, and I’m glad. It uses cdparanoia to rip discs, unless you tell it to use another program, and that’s fine with me. As far as I can tell, comparing rip-for-rip with EAC, cdparanoia makes a really accurate copy (provided your drive doesn’t cache). In fact, you can tell cdparanoia to be stupidly accurate if you want. Grip encodes to FLAC, mp3, ogg, aac, and more, and it gives you full control over the encoding options. I just realized that I’m sounding like an ad for grip, which isn’t intentional, but it’s really so much better and easier – even easier than what I was doing in Windows. At least, it’s easier while managing one format library at a time, which is what most sensible people do. With grip, once your “config” tabs are set up, you can reduce the whole process to a few clicks per CD (or less) and a sanity check on the autotagging. Grip creates linux-friendly filenames for your tracks and automatically puts audio files into a reasonable directory structure, which you have control over through tag editing prior to ripping. What a great idea.
Now I’ve arrived at the final juncture of library organization #1 much faster than I had hoped as a result of both grip and amaroK, a fully-featured and functional software jukebox (that’s the fastest description I could concoct). But I’m still going to have to do at least one of the things I was originally trying to avoid: write a script to convert the FLAC library I have been recording to both MP3 and ogg, keeping the directory structure intact. Oh well. Some things can’t be avoided. Unless there’s an approach out there that hasn’t turned up under any of my query strings. In any case, at least I can listen to a shuffled version of my entire lossless music collection while I write the script…
[ Note: if you didn't do a good job with your directory structure, amaroK will fix it all up for you (that's putting it lightly) with the "Manage Files..." --> "Organize Files..." command in the right-click menu. But beware running that command on your whole collection. It blows your CPU to bits. (Yes, intended.) ]
Wesley J. Smith has recently posted an article about a new bill that has been brought to the Canadian legislature. The purpose of the bill is to legalize euthanasia, along with many other “peripheral” details. I didn’t know what to say when I looked at the list of provisions in the bill. All I could think of was the tragic resemblance of the current legislation of developed nations to dystopian novels I’ve read. What are we thinking?
“My eyes shed streams of water, because they do not keep your law.”
Psalm 119:136
This morning I read a few of the words of Thomas Manton, a puritan pastor and teacher, on this verse. Charles Spurgeon quotes him in the Treasury of David: “The Lord requireth this mourning bitterly for other men’s sins to keep our hearts the more tender and upright; it is an act God useth to make us more careful of our own souls, to be troubled at the sins of others, at sin in a third person. It keepeth us at a great distance from temptation. This is like quenching of fire in a neighbour’s house: before it comes near thee, thou runnest with thy bucket. There is no way to keep us free from the infection, so much as mourning. The soul will never agree to do that which it grieved itself to see another do. And, as it keepeth us upright, so also humble, fearful of Divine judgment, tender lest we ourselves offend, and draw down the wrath of God. He that shrugs when he seeth a snake creeping upon another, will much more be afraid when it cometh near to himself” (emphasis mine).
I was struck at the difference between David’s apprehension of sin (both in the first and “third person”) and my own. David is not in this passage reviling the world for its sin, or holding it over their heads in what we might call a pharisaical manner. Many who articulate a profession of Christian faith have one of those two attitudes toward sin in general, but we know that this is improper and does not line up with David’s heart in this Psalm. On the contrary, as Robert Leighton has remarked concerning this passage, “We find not here a desire of fire to come down from heaven upon the breakers of the law, but such a grief as would rather bring water to quench it, if it were falling on them.”
Do I and my fellow Christians mourn for our sins and the great weight of sin in the world in such a way that it becomes much easier for our hearts to avoid succumbing to temptations? In the words of J.C. Ryle, “I doubt it.” Sin has become a laughing matter, an occasion for caustic or sarcastic derision. Sin, I fear, is no longer serious to us. Why not? Perhaps because our hearts are not like the heart of David as it is expressed in verse 161 of the same psalm: “My heart stands in awe of Your words.” We, in our hearts, have replaced the tenderness of the fear of God in large measure with the cynicism and cavalier attitude of the modern world. I think we unconsciously live with a worldview not based in the Bible. Our words and actions demonstrate a propensity toward humoring sin (especially notable in our attitude toward others, or sin “in the third person”) rather than mourning for sin. This should not be!
My prayer this morning is that God would guide my heart and mind into the path of David, and out of the common casual path which seems not so unlike the “broad road leading to destruction” (Matthew 7:13). Toward mourning for sin, away from snickering at it. Toward shedding streams of water from my eyes. Toward running to my neighbor’s burning house with a bucket of water instead of a book of matches.
Though you wouldn’t realize it if you follow the mainstream media (or listen regularly to Obama’s rhetoric, which amounts to almost the same thing), we (and the Iraqi people) are making a great deal of progress in Iraq. The situation has turned dramatically from what it was even a couple of years ago. There’s a fantastic article on recent Iraq developments by Charles Krauthammer at the Patriot Post. You can read it here. Krauthammer calls for John MccCain to make this fact a substantial part of his platform. Is that a good strategy? I can’t see why not.
My somewhat disillusioning experience with American health care as a result of my wife’s sudden onset of Crohn’s disease symptoms has prompted me look outside “the system” for second and third opinions. I am currently researching immunology and allergy because of the experiences of a good friend who is recieving treatment from Dr. Shrader at the Santa Fe Center for Allergy & Environmental Medicine. The subject of alternative medicine is fraught with peril. Knowing this, and having already read some works in the field containing questionable deductions or spurious reasoning, I desired to put my inquiry into perspective. I have just finished a book – “Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady”, by Mark Jackson – that has been some help to me in that regard. I thought I’d share a bit about it.
The quote from The Independent on the face of the book itself is accurate praise: ‘Meticulously researched and well written.’ Jackson covers the recent history of the allergy phenomenon from social, cultural, environmental and (to a degree) medical perspectives. He begins with the coining of the term “allergy” in 1906 as a “convenient means of defining various manifestations of biological reactivity”. As the narrative progresses, that definition is revised substantially and the reader is introduced to the controversy that has surrounded the whole idea of allergy and etiology for at least a century. Thomas Beddoes’s 1802 analysis of comsumption as a disease of civilization, or “of our own making”, afflicting primarily the wealthy, becomes for Jackson an analogue representative of allergy and the place it has assumed in 21st century culture.
Among the many things I was surprised to discover through Jackson’s work are (1) how little is actually known for certain about the reactions between our bodies and the environment, (2) the ardent suppression of research on food and chemical sensitivity by pharmaceutical / agribusiness interests, along with the corollary: a great deal of emphasis placed on mass-applicative drug research and distribution, (3) the existence of current, quite possibly viable theories of immune system function which challenge the modern medical allergy paradigm. I am now less surprised that our gastroenterologist, for example, has mentioned nothing to us regarding possible food sensitivity issues (even though Crohn’s is a gut disease), nor even recommended us to a dietitian, because education on allergy in med school, even the strictly-defined IgE-mediated sort, and practical treatment of it in clinics has all but disappeared from Britain’s NHS – the nation where our doctor was educated. Not that the US is a great deal friendlier to the cause these days. In fact, all studies of “biological reactivity” and experimental practice that fall outside the realm of IgE and histamine / mast cell functions have been unfortunately relegated to “quack” status by the present establishment, despite the fact that thousands of people seek these “quacks” after disappointment with drug treatments designed only to alleviate symptoms, treatments which shed no light on underlying problems (see ch. 6 of “Allergy” for much more on this).
The study goes into such great detail on so many facets of allergy history that it’s impossible to even summarize it very well in a few paragraphs. Suffice it to say that I commend “Allergy” to anyone who desires perspective on modern medicine and the state of affairs with our present civilization’s common ailment. As the NewScientist review from 2006 states, “The bad news is that it is probably going to get worse. The good news? If you read this book, at least you will know why.”
The medical status post has been significantly updated. You can read it here.
After being a loyal Firefox user for years, it’s hard to say it. Of course, there are those who will disagree. Anyone will tell you that this is regularly (and hotly) contested all over the web. I am aware, of course, that Firefox devs made some progress with just-released version 3. But I read some things recently that forced me to at least give some other browsers a shot, for testing purposes. I run Linux Mint (Ubuntu derivative), so I didn’t want to bother with IE in WINE, but it turns out I didn’t have to. I tried out Opera 9.5 and it blew me away. I’ll tell you why.
Three little things made an impression right away: first, the default font setup (in Linux) was more visually pleasing than the default in Firefox 3. That’s totally subjective, of course, but many of the “little things” are. Second, the default Opera skin looked classy to me, whereas Firefox always looked, well, typical. Third: Speed Dial.
One big thing also made an immediate impression. Opera was fast. It opened very quickly (and still does, even when loading a full Speed Dial page). I noted that Opera tended to use less RAM, generally speaking, than Firefox always had (though that’s one of many things that have been improved in release 3). And browsing in Opera feels fast. That feel is a sensation that’s difficult to qualify in terms of figures and statistics, but I assure you it’s empirically verifiable. Its what Mac folks have always been saying about Safari – I think I understand them a bit better now.
As I stated above, I found the UI pleasing and first glance, and my impressions improved as I continued using Opera. Keybindings and mouse gestures add to the speed factor; skins, widgets and “setups” make customization for my workflow relatively easy (and they’ve got a Pandora radio widget – can you beat that?); and (dramatic pause) it’s a very secure browser. I even switched from Yahoo webmail to Gmail in order to keep using Opera because of Yahoo’s javascript standards compatibility issues. If you haven’t tried Opera, you might want to. Give it a go against the latest Firefox and see how you rate the difference. Here’s some resources I haven’t already mentioned or linked for further information.
Firefox Myths: old news, but not all obsolete
Yet another browser comparison
Mozilla Firefox
Opera
This week I finally made the decision. I had vacillated for some time, but I knew that my conscience wasn’t going to let me alone. I was hanging on, thinking in pragmatic terms, holding on to the “fighting the corporate beast” mentality. But I can’t do it anymore. No matter how you shake it, no matter how ugly the whole game is and how poor I am, it’s still illegal; and I am more than thoroughly convinced that how we live as Christians (down to the little details) matters to God.
I destroyed all of my pirated software.
(And what remained of my pirated music.)
I should never have had any of it in the first place, but it’s one of those areas in which I had turned a blind eye to what I knew was true in the face of an overwhelming cultural phenomenon (read more about this here). Regardless of how our system, and the paid-content business model, needs to change, I won’t change either by stealing from them. Rather, I’ve come to think that I may be able to contribute my bit to the change more effectively by simply not buying what I don’t really need and supporting the FOSS community with time, effort and input. No one can continue selling a product which is no longer in demand in the market.
Now we’re running Linux at home (Mint – an Ubuntu derivative) with a suite of free, open-source software, and my conscience has been salved. You know what? It works fantastically, even with my quirky cheap wireless USB set-up, and the GUI is a heck of a lot “prettier” than Explorer was. The Linux learning curve is not as steep as it once was – my wife is picking it up quickly – and there are thousands and thousands of people across the world working to write, improve, test and deliver new software for almost every conceivable sort of application. I don’t know why we didn’t do this long ago. I guess that’s another one of those infuriating things about the deceitfulness of sin.
