ouij

I've been looking into LaTeX for legal documents. I already use LaTeX for personal things, such as generating study outlines:


My 1L CivPro outline.

The best part about LaTeX is that it makes the structure of the documents trivially easy. I can forget about formatting, and concentrate on the content.

Of course, this is hardly WYSIWYG:



The green-and-black terminal window is what I see when I create a document in LaTeX--the finished product is shown up top.

Of course, TeX is generally a science, mathematics, & engineering thing; humanities types don't use it very much, and lawyers don't use it at all.

One problem is that we're already too wedded to our working methods. We rely on word processors to generate our documents--even though we could benefit from the more predictable behavior of a typesetting language like TeX.

Our citation style doesn't help, either. The Bluebook is needlessly complex, and its conventions are so idiosyncratic as to make it nearly impossible to use existing bibliographic styles and software to manage citations in a complex document.

That means that we're left fly-specking documents for stray commas or spaces. Not only is it annoying, I figure it's a waste of time.

Unfortunately, all the work implementing legal citation styles for TeX seems to be overseas. Jurabib was developed for German legal style--close, but not quite. biblatex doesn't quite do law. The most promising implementation, Camel, seems to have ceased development, and its lead developerhas dropped off the face of the Earth.

What I wish I had was the ability to bang out legal documents in TeX, and then specify my citations on the fly, in a way that's familiar to me as lawyer--something like LyX, with Camel support.

Sigh.

I suppose I shall have to make it myself, if I'm to have it--but I wish I had time to learn how to do that.

How many Ubuntu flavors can I run at once?

This is Virtualbox-OSE running on top of Ubuntu Intrepid x64. Guest OSes are OpenGEU (a flavor of Ubuntu that uses the Enlightenment DR 17 window manager), eeebuntu (a flavor of ubuntu aimed at ASUS eee pc's), and Ubuntu Hardy Heron i386.

Next up: I need to find a legitimate Windows XP license to run XP in virtualbox's "seamless" mode.

Performance isn't too bad, actually.

A while back--in 2006, actually--I wished for a netbook preferrably with an ARM processor. The whole idea would be a lightweight, portable netbook with "all-day" battery life.

I have since gotten an eee pc 701, and have enjoyed it very much.

But I think the eee pc's run is about over with me, because looks like my ARM netbook dreams may soon come true. After a bit of searching, I even turned up some videos of an ARM-powered netbook reference design--cranking out what purports to be 720p video:



This is perfect. With Ubuntu ported to the ARM architecture, I can have both my architecture of choice and my operating system of choice--all in a convenient, easy-to-carry package. Early reports have been very encouraging. And the price point? A very recession-friendly $199. I can dig it.

More video:






and in FRENCH (or possibly Franglais):

a bug report the devs mark WONTFIX

I've been spending the last part of my vacation time sorting out various family IT projects. My dad's old laptop, a Sharp Actius MM20. The MM20 (and its predecessor, the MM10) was a couple of years ahead of the curve on what has since become the netbook trend-. It's thinner than a MacBook Air, has very humble hardware, and is meant to be a portable supplement to a more powerful "base" computer.

The Actius had one other thing in common with many of today's netbooks: it ran Linux pretty well-- well enough to be sold by Emperor Linux as their most portable system (the Meteor).

I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" on it, and Dad had been using it as a Linux machine for a while now, dual-booting with Windows XP. He has a new XP laptop (amusingly, its' an ASUS eeePC 1000, running Windows XP). Since now he has a whole new box running Windows, he asked me to wipe his old PC to run Ubuntu exclusively.

I decided to take the opportunity to install a more up-to-date version of Ubuntu. An install of Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" failed--well, the textmode installer ran, but then on first boot, the machine just went black and did nothing--I couldn't even bring up a text console.

I burned through a bunch of CDs before it occurred to me to try to boot into a recovery mode session and see what was up. Turns out that the Ubuntu installer wasn't configuring Xorg properly.

Fortunately, it seems that novalugger David Cafaro has already solved this problem. I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf along his lines. The relevant stanzas go like this:


Section “Device”

Identifier “Videocard0″
Driver “radeon”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”

EndSection

Section “Screen”

Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”

Viewport 0 0
Depth 24

EndSubSection

EndSection


Fix that, reboot, and X should start.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS "Hardy Heron" instead--figuring that Dad should probably get a stabler Long-term support release rather than having to update every six months like I do.

I'm waiting for rsync to cook through another backup of my /home directory, then I'll power down and install Vista Home Basic.

Not gonna lie: I am filled with a great sense of foreboding.

I never thought I would be writing this.

I think I'm going to install Windows Vista on sputnik, my current box.

I have been a pretty satisified Ubuntu user for four years now. I have gotten to the point where I don't feel particularly tied to Windows as an operating system--at least not for work.

So why go to Vista?

Simple. I love playing Civ 4. Some people have been able to get it running on Linux. But there are always all kinds of hiccups running in WINE. Fortunately, sputnik's hardware is good enough to run Civ4 quite capably.

Why Vista Home Basic? I don't really care for the visual chrome that is Microsoft's Aero desktop. Linux desktop chrome is nicer and more useful. Nor do I have any real need for the incremental-backup features that the "premium" flavors of Vista offer me--for a price. Since the Windows partition will be used mostly as a light-duty gaming rig, I don't anticipate any real problems in that department.

Does this mean I'm going to switch back to MSFT? Not really. I'm treating this like a gaming-console purchase.

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?

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.

Following on from yesterday's quick look at WebMynd, I've had another chat with WebMyndMaster Amir, who tells me:

• Work is in progress on a Linux version. I've had a chance to test-drive an early beta build; it seems to work, and indexes fine, but I'll give it a more detailed write-up when I get time.
  
• Sharing and Tagging functions are in the works. The WebMynd team are trying to get some sharing and tagging functions into later versions of the extension. This would definitely make the extension more useful. Many initial blog reactions have speculated about possible tagging/social features in the future, and I can now confirm that these are on the way.
  

Sharing-and-tagging--I'll call it 'shagging'--has been great fun for me on flickr. It'd be interesting to see how it works on the Web.

Yeah, I know, I could just use del.icio.us, but this is slicker--if I can get it to work.

My iRiver H340 battery has been dying for a while now. So, as a birthday present, I went ahead and bought a replacement battery.

Fortunately, licketysplitauctions on ebay carries batteries for the H340. I ordered a 2200 mAh battery for the princely sum of $15.99, plus $4.49 shipping. The battery arrived quickly, but I only got around to installing it this weekend.

Happily, there are plenty of instructions available for DIY battery replacement on the H340. The whole process took maybe an hour--most of that was my fiddling around, afraid of breaking stuff. If I had to do it again, I could probably do the job in about twenty minutes. The Cameron Sino battery pack was a perfect fit--really a drop-in replacement. Added bonus: no need to do any nerd-fu on the Molex connectors, since the battery shipped with the wires the "right" way around for iRivers. (First-generation iPod batteries will also work, but the wires are reversed, and the 2200 mAh cells are juuuust a bit too thick for the case, which requires some sandpaper-fu on the interior--not something I wanted to do with my weekend).

The battery took about two hours to charge. I decided to let the player run constantly until it discharged so I could get a sense of how much battery life I can get out of the player. The thing kept going...and going....and going.... I measured a runtime of 19 hours, 54 minutes, 12 seconds--impressive, considering that the H340 used to give me 9 or 10 hours before the stock 1300 mAh battery went flat.

For those of you interested, here's a graph:


Voltage (mV) over Time (seconds): Cameron Sino 2200 mAh Battery, iRiver H340, Rockbox

I might be the last person on the series of tubes to catch on to this. But as I was shopping for next semester's textbooks, I noticed that Amazon.com has begun offering mp3 downloads!.

OK, go ahead. Be smug. I know that you've all been using the iTunes Music Store for ages and ages. And you know that I've been resisting iTMS and similar services because of my opposition to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

Amazon at last has begun to compete with Apple--not just on price, but on the terms offered. The Amazon mp3 store gives me pretty much what I've been missing at much more favorable licensing terms than what Apple has been insisting on for iTMS. This vindicates Judge Easterbrook's opinion in ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg:

Terms of use are no less a part of "the product" than are the size of the database and the speed with which the software compiles listings. Competition among vendors, not judicial revision of a package's contents, is how consumers are protected in a market economy

ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447, 1453 (7th Cir. 1996).

There is still one annoying hurdle. In order to complete your purchase, you must install Amazon's MP3 Downloader. All well and good if you run Windows or OSK--not so much for Linux. Linux users can still purchase individual tracks, but are shut out of purchasing albums at the "album discount" price--

Or at least they were, until mad-scientist took a crack at the problem. He has cleverly figured out a way of using the Amazon MP3 Downloader in Linux with WINE with the help of a bit of bash script-fu.

I've tried it out and it works. This is extremely useful--and possibly ruinous to my budget. But there you have it.
http://mad-scientist.us/amazon.html

I'm carrying my eee pc in a U.S. Army surplus gasmask bag, which I picked up on sale for four bucks at Ranger Surplus in Fairfax.

My particular bag used to carry an M25A1 gas mask. This type of mask was issued to tankers, and apparently hooked up to an air supply system inside the tank. Consequently, there's a hole in the bag (reinforced by a very sturdy grommet) where the gas mask's hose would have protruded from. This would have been handy in a gas attack, since the tank crew could simply don their masks and plug in without necessarily having to remove the mask from the bag entirely.

For my purposes, however, it means there's a 40mm hole in the bag. That will be fixed soon with a trip to the hardware store: hot glue plus a drain plug should do the trick.

Other than that, this is a brilliant way to carry the computer. It's a gas mask bag, so it was meant to be carried close to the body at all times. It's a good size for the eee pc plus its power cord. And, come on, let's face it, it's pretty bad-ass.

Other patterns of gas mask bags might work just as well, if not a little better. All the infantry ones I could find, though, looked like they were intended to be clipped to an infantryman's load-bearing harness--not something I wear every day.

Old Swiss-pattern gas mask bags might work as well, dimensionwise, but they tend to be more cylindrical than rectangular in shape.

I'll be using this for a while--at least until I can score some surplus East German gear in their "rain" pattern.

Took the eee pc to school today. The network-wallahs were very impressed.

I came in this morning to get myself connected to the university network. The first tech who saw me was suitably impressed. By the afternoon, I had accidentally messed with the network settings, so I brought it in to the techs again.

The second tech I talked to was so surprised to see an actual eee pc he jumped up out of his seat, shook my hand, fixed my networking issues, then talked with me animatedly about Linux and the eee pc and how he really wanted one for diagnosing network problems--no sense lugging a huge computer for that job.

He led e back into his cubicle--a space crammed with manuals and hardware--gave me his card, and told me to keep him aprised of how I was getting along with the eee pc.

Then he took me aside. "Don't publicize this. We don't really support Linux. I run Linux, and you run Linux. You look like a guy who knows what he's doing. I don't want to have anyone else coming in here who has no clue expecting us to get his Linux laptop up and running--at least not until we're ready."

The form factor is great. I was able to work on a crowded Metro (hacking up a text file). The nearly instant powerup makes it an ideal commuter. I'm carrying it in an old (small) padded laptop case. The machine is just big enough to fit inside a large ziplock bag--so that's how I carry it, to give myself a measure of weather protection. A smaller ziplock for the power cord, and I'm good to go.

More reaction, from other users:

"Aw, cute!"

"Laptop? On you, that's more like a LEG top, buddy."

"What is that thing?"

Just as I predicted I now have a brand-new Asus eee pc just in time for the joys of exam week! As a matter of fact, I'm typing this update on it right now.

First impressions are VERY favorable. It runs right out of the box. The startup time is ridiculously fast. The system is remarkably responsive.

The keyboard, as you might expect, is miniscule. My hands, as you might know, are not miniscule. The small size of the keyboard does cut down on my maximum typing speed. But otherwise, it isn't too bad; I just have to remember to curl my fingers to get the tips right up on the keys--kind of like playing Bach on the piano.

This is pretty much what I want in a portable device. If this can work with the university wireless, then I'll be in hog heaven.

I'm thinking about getting a new battery for my iriver H340. I like the player, and rockbox is working really well. The stock 1700 mAh battery isn't holding much of a charge any more, and I know of places that'll sell me a suitable 2200 mAh battery for not a lot of money. The additional capacity would be more than welcome, and it would give me a "better-than-new" H340. All I'd need to do is be handy with a screwdriver.

Since the information on this little black art seems to be fading into the Internets, I'm reposting the relevant links here, as much for my own reference as to feed Google.

Funny, I end up using this blog as a kind of public bookmark list. . .

There are video howtos for this sort of thing, naturally. It doesn't seem like it's going to be that much of a challenge.

There used to be an excellent non-video howto on the Misticriver.net forums, but it appears that there has been some kind of catastrophe over at Misticriver--all Google references to their old forums are dead. Luckily, someone made a backup PDF of the relevant thread.

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 pleased to report the (thus-far) successful build of my new computer, hostname sputnik. Ubuntu Feisty installed and booted, and I'm letting it burn-in a few hours before I get to work getting the OS up to date and tweaking things to my liking.