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OpenOffice 2.3 takes somewhere near forever to load for me. A bit of google-fu uncovered this guide to speeding up OpenOffice load times in Ubuntu.

I can say that this certainly did it. OpenOffice Writer starts almost instantly now. YAY.

OpenOffice.org is not ready for the desktop. There, I said it. Flame me, O my Free Software-using comrades.

I've managed a semester and a half so far without having to resort to proprietary software. I use Firefox for all my browsing--even for WestLaw and LexisNexis. I use vim and LaTeX to prepare my outlines. My ASUS eee PC runs Xandros. My home computer runs Ubuntu.

And, yes, up until now, I have used OpenOffice.org for my word-processing needs. OpenOffice Writer is a decent word processor--at least as good for most users as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. OpenOffice Writer has served me well thus far in Legal Writing class: several drafts each of two memoranda, pleadings, and a motion. But the upcoming appellate brief spells the end of its usefulness.

Appellate briefs need Tables of Authorities. For the non-lawyers out there, a ToA is a kind of sectioned bibliography for lawyers: it indexes all the various citations used in a document by type of authority (constitutions, statutes, regulations, case law, secondary authorities, etc.).

MS Word and WordPerfect have table-of-authority builders built right into the program. Essentially, the ToA builder goes through the whole document, looking for anything that might look like it's a citation. Once it finds a possible citation, it stops: the user can then mark the citation and add it to an index. In the end, you end up with something that looks like this:


TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 273 U.S. 177, 93 F.2d 14
(1953)...................1, 2



There, you see Brown, its full citation in Blue Book format, and the pages where it's cited.

Now, OpenOffice and LaTeX should be able to do a simple trick like this--and do it better. But they're structurally different programs. Instead of treating the document like one long stream of text, they use a "structured document" model.

Theoretically, the structured document should be better: you define the logical parts of your document and let the program deal with all the fiddly character-by-character design issues. To make this work, you need to have a separate bibliographic database, and then insert tagged references into the document as you go. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. In OpenOffice, as in TeX, it's the bibliographic package (bibtex or some such) that generates the formatted citation. And, wouldn't you know it--there aren't any style files out there for legal citations.

Sure, TeXheads, tell me about jurabib or biblatex. But all the style files kicking around are mathematics, sciences, or engineering. I'm lucky if I find a regular humanities style file--never mind actually find anything useful for us lawyers.

And I really don't have the time or the inclination these days to break down and really learn any of the bibliographic systems in *nix to make them work for lawyers.

So this is what I'm reduced to. I'm going to have to crawl back to Microsoft Office for an appellate brief. Luckily, Word 97 runs very well in WINE.

Still, I feel a bit annoyed at having to go back to Microsoft for this. What do I have to do to get decent ToA support out there in OO.o or TeX? Where do I post the bounty?

You're really not endearing yourselves to me by running those ridiculously intrusive popover flash ad banners on the Washington Post website. Thank God for Flashblock.

But seriously, Mr. Leonsis, can you possibly find a more disruptive & distracting way to market the team? I was kind of a hockey fan before. Now you're just pissing me off. It's not like I have anything emotionally tying me to the game anyway.

So, obviously, it was going to be Cookie Monster who cheered me up. Thanks, C-man.

I have seen the end of 32-bit addressing, my friends, and let me tell you, it's not pretty.

My default e-mail client, Evolution, is great, but it keeps my incoming mail in a single mbox file. (for you *nix nerds, by default this is at ~/.evolution/mail/local/).

Over the years, as I've migrated from computer to computer, I have brought my archived e-mails with me in various mbox files. As of last night, that represented a little under six years' of e-mail correspondence. I'd simply folded the mbox files into each other, allowing me to have a single mbox file that I could search--not that I did all that much grepping through my old logs, but I do go poking into my old correspondence every so often.

But there was a problem lurking here. On IA32, the Linux kernel can only handle files smaller than two gigabytes. It simply can't address anything bigger. After years of folding mboxes into each other, my Inbox file finally got so huge that the kernel just couldn't deal with it any more--Evolution spat an error about the file being too large, and there I was.

Now I know what the Paleolithic inhabitants of the cave at Zhoukoudian/Choukoutien felt like, as they were slowly squeezed out by the ashes of their continuously-tended fires.

I spent most of late last night/early this morning installing the AMD64 build of Ubuntu. Just as expected, the 64-bit kernel addressed the huge 2 GB file with no problem, and I set to work moving older files in the mbox to a series of archives (by year).

Sadly, this hasn't yet shrunk the file by nearly enough to make it addressable by my 32-bit Ubuntu install. Evo spits out a "file too large for data type" error--and, sure enough, the software reports an mbox file over two gigabytes big.

Most of the prolbem comes from my ISP: about a year ago, their POP3 server started acting weird; occasionally resetting the "read" status on messages. Since I download local copies of all the data on the remote server, this could be bad news: every time the ISP hiccups, I'm obliged to download the past however many months of messages all at once. I've tried to deal with it as best I can, but I probably have a metric shitload of redundant copies in that mbox file alone. Thanks, guys. I'll need to install a plugin or run a script to get rid of the redundancies.

Or I could just bite the bullet and migrate to a 64-bit kernel. But I'm so dependent on WINE and various non-free codecs that are avalable only on IA32 that migrating to the new architecture would be a real pain in the ass.

A hardware failure just cost me all of last weeks' class notes.

Fortunately, we didn't cover anything substantive. But now I'm more than a little annoyed that I didn't back it up daily like I should have been doing.

The Dean will permit me to matriculate, having seen the copy of the transcript which I had in my files, and attested to its authenticity. They will, however, expect the arrival of an official transcript from Cambridge, pursuant to ABA regulations.

Also, the student-record wallahs have advised me that they have received payment (thanks to my friendly neighbourhood hawaladar)--my order will finish processing in three days. Had the strike not been in effect, they would have received payment two weeks ago, and the transcript would already be where it ought to be.

This has been a dinner for Damocles, for sure.

Just got off the phone with admissions/academic affairs.

I had been able to find a copy of my transcript in my posession, which they say they might sign off on provisionally pending the arrival of my actual transcript. They still want the transcript as soon as possible, though.

On that end, there are agents working tirelessly to ensure the prompt dispatch of that damned sheet of paper.

The operative word here, gentle readers, is sheet. British universities are not at all like American universities--consequently, their transcripts are not at all like American transcripts. The law school wants an American-style transcript with classes by semester, grades, credit hours, and all the rest of it. Cambridge gives one sheet giving name, college, matriculation date, Tripos results, papers taken, and degree date.

That's it.

All the rest of the translation has to be done by other services--one of which I was already obliged to use during my application process.

I faxed the transcript to the law school's admission office, and they asked where the transcript was. I was at pains to explain to them that what I faxed them was in fact a transcript--at least as far as the term was understood in Cambridge. Then they said that whatever it was, it would do until an official transcript could be received.

Wait, I said. What happens if after all my scrambling--and there's been a lot of scrambling (some of it by innocent third parties and at least one friend acting as a hawaladar)--the packet that arrives from England is no different from what I've shown you?

Response?

"Oh. Um..."

I've got to go in and see the Dean for academic affairs tomorrow at half-past eleven to explain myself. With any luck, I can report my official transcript already in transit. The copy I have--signed and sealed (embossed) with the University Arms--should hopefully permit the Dean to let me register and enroll pending the arrival of more formal documents.

"Well, we've certainly worked through this!" the admissions counselor said to me, half-pleased and half-relieved.

"We won't have worked through this until I can get you that packet," I frowned over the phone.

The entire process is making me sick. Why does this have to happen to me now?

Just over a week to go before Registration Day for law school for me, and already I'm in a panic. This isn't your garden-variety 0L to 1L angst. What's getting me down is labor warfare.

In order to matriculate and begin my legal studies, the law school needs an official copy of my undergraduate academic transcript.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal; I'd send my letters to the Student Administration wallahs (as the redoubtable Dr. Anil Seal might have called them), and they would turn around the request in under two weeks.

That would be the case now, were it not for a postal strike by the Communication Workers' Union against the Royal Mail. The dispute, as in all things, seems to stem from the Royal Mail's plans to "modernise"--that is, downsize--in the face of competition from private entities and other postal organizations. The posties are having none of it: first they threatened, and then carried out two weeks of rolling strike action against the post office: international deliveries, truck driving, regional sorting offices, and the like.

Consequently, the Student Records wallahs haven't received my written request for a transcript, and thus can't move.

It gets better though. Just when I thought the strike might be over and the mail moving in time to deliver my transcript before registration, the CWU announced a further two weeks of strikes!

Now I'm shafted. I'm writing the dean's office at the law school and forwarding them the story from Auntie Beeb, just to show I'm not bullshitting them. The dean's office was very nice, but they don't seem to understand that I can't actually get hold of a transcript until the posties stop striking.

I'm trying to buy something off craigslist. The buyer seems keen to sell--but is extremely coy about his location. "Ten minutes from Springfield mall" is as close as I've gotten from him in several days' correspondence. At last check, several thousand people live within that ten-minute drive--even more if you drive during non-rush hours.

I can understand the reluctance to have a total stranger (me) come to your door, but come on. I've offered to meet the seller in a suitably public place. Let's see how this goes.

This is a major contrast from my last craigslist transaction for a pair of old 27" beater wheels. Seller gave me an address and map references. When I arrived to talk about the wheels, I discovered he was running a kind of underground bike shop out of his basement.

In the tradition of junkies selling dope to feed their habit, this gentleman started dealing bikes and parts. "My wife got so mad at me once," he told me. "I had spent $89 on parts at Nashbar (a mail-order bike catalog), but earlier in the day I had sold a bike for $200. All she saw was the $89 bucks I spent--she didn't even care that I'd just flipped a bike for $200! After that, I've kept it cash-only, so she won't know. . . "

Just like the famous red paperclip guy, he's been flipping bikes and trading up. He even showed off his current pride and joy: a beautiful white Schwinn Paramount (It looked a lot like this one). Quite an impressive stash. We talked bikes and riding for a while, and he gave me a couple of freewheels he wasn't using gratis.

As I was getting out, he grabbed a red blinkie to put on his mailbox. Apparently, if heraises the red lantern, he's open for business.

Compared with that, my present dithering paranoid is trying my patience.

FPYC Fathers' Day Tournament, Lewinsville Park, McLean.

I can't even describe to you how stupid this was. I wonder if he was trying to park on the grass, and then somehow abandoned the effort midway?

Via digg, I bring you a helpful guide on How NOT to use PowerPoint by stand-up comic Don McMillan.

PowerPoint was supposed to make your presentations more effective. Unfortunately, most PowerPoint presentations are dense, obscure, and not particularly helpful. Once you realize that you're being subjected to death by PowerPoint, the best you can hope for is that you have merely wasted your time.

Unfortunately, the consequences of some PowerPoint presentations are more serious. In Thomas Ricks' latest book, Fiasco, we discover that the entire Iraq War was conceived, planned, and refined in a series of PowerPoint presentations:



This slide shows how the Pentagon viewed the transition to "Strategic Success" in Iraq. Notice: this slide contains ZERO factual content. Scan taken from Arms and Influence

Let's be blunt: PowerPoint is a tool of the illiterate. The written word, skillfully deployed, can express complex realities. PowerPoint takes those complex realities and makes them into meaningless visual window-dressing.

After a bit of googling about, it seems that I'm affected by Ubuntu Bug #111375, which itself seems to be kernel bug #8423. According to kernel.org's bugzilla, this has been fixed, but a new Ubuntu kernel hasn't been compiled yet.

This puts me in a bit of a bind. I could, conceivably, apply the kernel patch myself--but then that would leave me up a creek with the nvidia drivers. Or I could just wait until the patched kernel shows up in the repos, and just live with the fact that I don't get speed-stepping. I'm opting for the latter. That way, I could probably just run a 32-bit kernel and not have to worry about the various workarounds for flash and java.

So, while I'm waiting--c'mon Ubuntu team!--here's some entertainment:

While sputnik runs well enough on a 32-bit 'generic' kernel, I am tempted to try an AMD64 kernel to see if I can get CPUfreq to work properly. It's not that big a deal for me, since I haven't put anything on this host anyway.

I am at the office, transcribing something for the boss. The boss dictates a citation. I understand it's a citation, and format it in correct Bluebook style. The boss invariable INSISTS on his (outdated? non-standard?) citation format. But he's the boss, so I have to roll with it.

It's amazing how a stupid semicolon can ruin my morning.

xposted, bitches.

If we spent our time writing instead of fiddling with half-spaces, we might actually get somewhere.

I’ve fscking had it with rockbox.

For reasons that totally escape me, I am utterly unable to play oggs I’ve encoded since maybe November of last year in successive versions of rockbox. Not all ogg vorbis files are affected; some play. Most do not. When they don’t, the iRiver barfs...in recent Rockbox builds, it shows “No file!” errors. (previously, rockbox would simply stop....no explanations.)

Why am I fussed? I actually thought rockbox was a pretty good set of replacement firmware. The stock firmware plays all my files, no matter how I mess with them, but somehow, rockbox continues to be temperamental.

No one else seems to have been able to reproduce my bug, and this drives me up the wall, because I can’t reproduce it, either. There was a line, apparently, that said “oh, well, you can’t play anything encoded after $date in Rockbox, sorry.”

In a fit of pique, I deleted a lot of non-compliant files on my local backup. (NOT the iRiver). I think I’m just going to declare defeat, rsync everything back to the way it was, and carry on using iRiver’s firmware.

The downside to the increasing popularity of Linux has meant an influx of "Blinking 12:00" users, who have neither the capacity nor the desire to learn anything new. Some even threaten legal action on community boards when they hose their installs.

These are presumably the same people who argue with soundboards of Schwartzie soundbites.